A review by marmaladereads
In Memoriam by Alice Winn

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Beautiful. Literary. Utterly devastating account of war. Winn wove an absolutely gorgeous tale of how the naive and poetic Ellwood and the angry and stoic Gaunt are transformed by the trauma and brutality of war. 

This book makes you feel a lot of things. It's filled with love and hope and poetry amid some of the most terrible destruction and gore and the constant drumming of death. Winn manages to strike an incredibly delicate balance of never sugarcoating the brutality, with no character being safe or protected from it, and at the same time giving us just enough of a hopeful undertone that it never feels like trauma porn. 

The character development, war accounts, and love story are all masterfully woven throughout. This is definitely a book I'll be coming back to again and again.

Seeing Gaunt find true clarity and friendship during the war at the same time as Elly is utterly broken by it is possibly as devastating as the constant and rather gory accounts of deaths. It feels incredibly honest that no one comes out unscathed from this book, both physically and mentally, even the characters we come to care for the most.

I love that Winn found a way for Elly and Gaunt to be together in the end in a way where they didn't have to hide, despite the time period. After all they'd been through, I think they deserved at least that, though I would call their ending bittersweet at best.
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