Reviews with content warning for Suicide - In Memoriam

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In Memoriam by Alice Winn

103 reviews

lizziaha's review against another edition

Loveable characters? Yes

5.0

I was trying to decide, while I was reading this book, what makes boarding school stories feel so idyllic. I suppose it is the most wonderful version of life: surrounded by friends, intellectual conversations, secrets, sports, homoerotic tension. It’s not all good of course, but every time Elwood quotes a poem, I long for such an existence. But this isn’t a boarding school book exactly. It’s a war book. And it gets gory; the horrors of war are all too present in this book. But more than that, woven into every word of this book is love. There are different kinds: romantic, platonic, familial, love of life, love of country, love of poetry, but everywhere you look, there is love. And there is something captivating about love that persists against all odds. I think that is why I enjoyed the semi-epistolary nature of this book so much. It shows how these characters attempt to bundle that love up and put it into words as much as they can.

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introverted_reads's review

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dark emotional hopeful reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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dubious_little_creature's review against another edition

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dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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lillianreads's review against another edition

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emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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paulawind's review

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dark reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

To be perfectly honest, I expected more of a

kill your gays type of a situation

, especially considering time period,

but I’m so happy I was wrong! The more I think about it, it was the happiest ending that would be realistic in this situation.

We’ll always have Brazil, fuck the Old World.
This book was harrowing. I thought I was ready for the horrors of war after reading All Quiet on the Western Front, but this book only awoke my memories. Why do leaders decide to go to war when it is universally acknowledged that it is only bringing pain and suffering? And we do it all over again, for millennia. Maybe the Greeks got it more, when the war was more about man vs man rather than automated machines against civilians.
Coming to characters, side from them dropping like flies every other chapter, I think the author made us care about every (or almost every) death. The character development for both MCs was absolutely breaking my heart but

I’m so glad they found each other back in the end and are learning to love each other again

An almost complete emotional flip Gaunt and Ellwood did throughout the book hit me like a whiplash, but it was done in a way that it made sense. After all

Gaunt’s prisoners of war camp chapters were the most peaceful and cheerful of the entire book, whereas Elwood was facing bloodbath every day, seeing an orchestrated massacre on a daily basis

One of my favourite moments is when Elwood is screaming poetry at Gaunt, very blatantly professing his love in all meaning but the straightforward one, and Gaunt is so deep in denial that even thought he loved him desperately too, he can’t believe it’s really happening. Those characters in a nutshell. At least for the first part of the book. Later it would be Gaunt being gentle and endlessly patient with Elwood when he struggles to say anything at all and bursting in anger, fighting his ptsd. Gosh, I love those boys so much. Going to pretend that the book ended with “And they lived happily ever after”

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luca_18's review against another edition

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4.5

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kransom's review against another edition

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challenging emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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skylar_cr_wolf's review

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challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

“In this war he’s a god, Ellwood.” He put his face into his hands. “You’ve brought the anger of gods upon us.”

First of all, I need to thank two people kindly for recommending this book to me: Kieran and Harvey.
Thank you two for being part of this journey and being okay with me sharing my inner thoughts about this novel while I read and cried about it.

And now to the novel:

It is more than I can express. And I mean it. The entire topic of world wars is something which usually keeps me away from reading a novel, however, I am glad that it didn’t scare me away this time. Because while WWI is a major point in this book, it is not the central part. The main focus is on friendships and complicated romance, especially as a queer person in the 1910s to early 1920s. It is about how you change through being tormented by the ongoing war and how it changes also the connections you have to people. It is about the loss of them as well.
Another point which I liked but also surprised me a bit is the accuracy of languages. At least for the German part I can say that it is incredibly accurate. It was astonishing to see a novel which is mostly written in English to depict a fair share of languages in such an accurate form. As someone who is a bit of a lingual nerd (not as big as I used to) find this extremely marvellous.

I could say so much more. How much I love Gaunt and Ellwood. How much my heart still aches because of Sandys and how much I enjoyed the friendships between Gideon and Gaunt too. How much I will miss their journey and look forward to read it again at some other time.
And maybe this time I will be better prepared with enough tissues for farewells.

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pnwbibliophile's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

In Memoriam follows two eighteen-year-old English schoolboys at the outbreak of World War 1. Henry Gaunt is pushed by the women around him and his family to join the war effort. Half German, he feels obligated to join so that others won’t think his family are German spies. Ellwood, Gaunt’s closest friend, enlists a few months thereafter. Before their enlistment, we get a glimpse at their “before” life. Pampered, sheltered, idyllic—the life of rowdy elite boarding school boys quoting literature and naively romanticizing the war and its heroism. As their boarding school begins to resemble a farm producing young men for war’s slaughter, that idyllic “before” starkly juxtaposes against the harsh realities of the war.

What plays out is an immersive novel with achingly real characters. Gaunt and Ellwood’s friendship was always more to each of them, though they each think it is an unrequited love. With the war stripping them both physically and mentally, they have to confront their feelings as they cling to each other for the little bit of light amidst the brutality of trench warfare. They’re repeatedly separated and the sense of dread at each not knowing if the other was still alive (as well as their other friends) was captured brilliantly. The novel is further layered with the stories of their fellow friends and civilians back home. You get a true sense of the societal and personal effects of the war as if England herself were a third main character.

And yet that description seems idiotically unrepresentative of what this novel is. It is about love, loss, the immorality of war and empire, and the intricacies of masculinity and male bonds both romantic and platonic. But it is the way in which the author adeptly uses the plot, characterization, voice, and artful prose that makes this novel stand out. Alice Winn is a literary genius. She left no crumbs. I sobbed multiple times, the first time just 3 pages in. Never would I have thought that a fictional student newspaper would repeatedly gut me. The realness of the novel is rooted in the author’s research into the time period. With the emotion of a passion piece and execution of timeless classic literature, this was my favorite read thus far in 2024. It’s one of those stories that sticks with you.

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prachibhutada's review against another edition

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emotional sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The love story is so tender, especially warm when set inside a war. The book lost me in the middle with its jerky climax and I had to google search the story to make myself return. But the story picks up again when the jerky climax is over. The end feels convenient but my heart needed that.

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