Lovely War
Julie Berry
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Lovely War
Julie Berry
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Pick an adjective — sweeping, sprawling, epic, Olympian — and yet none quite conveys the emotional width and depth of Julie Berry’s brilliant new novel.
The bickering gods, romantic rendezvous and exploding shells, set against impeccably rendered Paris streets and sandbagged trenches, read like a divine mix of Kate Atkinson and Neil Gaiman. When the hurly-burly’s done, and the battle’s lost and won, does Love conquer War? The answer is never in doubt, but it’s a pleasure to have it confirmed by a celestially inspired storyteller..
In hands less skilled than Berry’s, this multifaceted novel might easily have spun out of control. Mixing Greek gods, the brutally described horrors of war, the tenderness of love, and the evils of racism, in both its blatant and insidious forms, seems more than one book can handle. Yet Berry is her own Scheherazade, mesmerizing us with intertwined tales that describe the depths of suffering and the sweetness of love with remarkable intensity and naturalness. This is one of those books in which readers will feel that they are in it together with all the story’s characters. In fact, it is one of Berry’s real triumphs that she manages to give nearly equal weight to a large cast of very different characters.
Berry [is] a modern master of historical fiction for young readers.
Whatever muse is singing in Berry to produce her lyrical writing, we’d like to lobby for their services. The story itself is intoxicating.
The narration by the Greek gods provides an original style of storytelling ...The horrors of the time and the ends to which the characters strive to maintain something wonderful in their lives attest to the research the author completed to weave such a heart-achingly beautiful story. This book is for anyone who has loved historical fiction by Ruta Sepetys or Alan Gratz. It’s just gorgeous..
An epic of Shakespearean emotional depth and arresting visual imagery that nonetheless demonstrates the racism and sexism of the period. Scheherazade has nothing on Berry whose acute eye for detail renders the glittering lights of Paris as dreamlike in their beauty as the soul-sucking trenches on the French front are nightmarishly real. The mortal characters are all vibrant, original, and authentic, but none is more captivating than the goddess of love herself, who teaches her husband that love is an art form worthy of respect and admiration.
Berry’s evocative novel starts slow but gains steam as the stories flesh out. Along the way, it suggests that while war and its devastation cycles through history, the forces of art and love remain steady, eternal, and life-sustaining..