The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

Ah, the middling book, packed with unfilled promises and what-ifs.

Set during WWI, The Warm Hands of Ghosts begins with a lot of potential. Arden sets the scene and characters up beautifully, along with the dual timelines that, by their sheer closeness, are destined to collide.

In January 1918, we meet Laura Iven, a revered field nurse wounded and discharged from the medical corp, Laura has returned home to Halifax, Canada. Further rocked by a tragedy just the previous month that claimed the lives of her parents (see Halifax Explosion), Laura is profoundly upset when she receives word of her brother's disappearance. But when his personal belongings, along with the full set of dog tags, arrives by mail one day, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer nurse for a private hospital to uncover what has happened to her brother, Freddie.

The narrative then dives back to November 1917 inside a half-destroyed pillbox where Freddie Iven awakens following an explosion. He discovers a companion in the rubble with him, a German solider named Hans Winter. As the two figure out how to work together to survive, they grapple with the idea of a way ahead that would keep them both alive.

While I loved the idea of visiting some rarely covered WWI topics, reading Arden's book felt like climbing an uphill battle of my own, only to have it collapse at the end. At first, Freddie's storyline felt like it had the more gripping elements and reminded me heavily of the Poitier / Curtis movie, The Defiant Ones (1958). Set in the Southern United States, the film features two escaped prisoners, one white and one Black, shackled together, who must learn to co-operate in order to survive. However, Freddie's story never really took root in anything meaningful or delved too deeply into a stronger connection or bigger conversation for the two from opposite sides.

The two timelines begin their collision course by way of a supernatural connection — both sets run into a magical oasis of sorts in Belgium. As Laura continues her work as a nurse with plans to set off to determine Freddie's fate, she and her two female travel companions (one being Mary Burton (a real-life person), happen into a magical underground reverie, where a mysterious figure, Faland, welcomes weary guests with food and music. He also has a magical mirror that shows people what they truly desire...and he has garnered a reputation among the soldiers who experienced his spectacle and long to return but are unable to find it a second time. Meanwhile, Freddie and Winter meet up with Faland on their own, impacting the pair in different ways.

Elements of The Warm Hands of Ghosts worked really well and played around with themes of mental health, grief, and guilt. But the opening took too long to get going, and by the time Faland and his "night circus" dreamscape arrives, it was hard to remain engaged. In fact, once over the hump of the halfway point, though I held out hope, the story was on a steady decline and all but fell apart by the end.

I adored Katherine Arden's Winternight trilogy, and would not hesitate to continue to recommend it wholeheartedly.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This affected neither my opinion of the book nor the content of my review.