The Warm Hands of Ghosts

Show Notes

The Warm Hands of Ghosts opens on Laura receiving her brother’s clothes in the mail in January 1918. Her brother Freddie fights for the Canadian army in Belgium. Something doesn’t add up about his supposed death so Laura, a discharged combat nurse, decides to go to Belgium herself to find Freddie. From there, the book alternates point of view chapters between the Iven siblings and timelines. Laura is the present timeline and Freddie’s timeline follows a few months behind. Freddie wakes in an overturned German pillbox with a wounded German soldier. In this hellish landscape both siblings find love. Freddie with the wounded German soldier Hans Winter, and Laura with the surgeon Stephen Jones. Arden creates a dark landscape with this novel’s explorations of, “Did you see a new hell too?”

Bayley’s tiktok

Books Referenced

The Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Uprooted by Naomi Novik

One Hundred Days of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Works Cited

Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon

Love letters between Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon

“Katherine Arden in conversation about evil, memory and the First World War”

Transcript

[00:00:00.000] - Beth

Welcome to Reformed Rakes, a historical romance podcast that would return to the trenches for you. My name is Beth, and I'm a grad student, and I write at the Substack Ministrations.

[00:00:09.760] - Emma

I'm Emma, a law librarian, writing about justice and romance at the Substack, Restorative Romance.

[00:00:14.750] - Beth

Today, we're talking about The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden. The Warm Hands of Ghosts opens on Laura receiving her brother's clothes in the mail in January 1918. Her brother, Freddy, fights for the Canadian Army in Belgium. Something doesn't add up about his supposed death, so Laura, a discharged combat nurse, decides to go to Belgium herself to find Freddy. From there, the book alternates point of view chapters between the Iven siblings and timelines. Laura is in the present timeline, and Freddy's timeline follows a few months behind. Freddie wakes up in an overturned German pill box with a wounded German soldier. In her author's note, Arden discusses how World War I was the time of shocking juxtapositions, where suits of armor went up against machine guns, cavalry charged at tanks. She describes this technology mismatch as the closest to historical science fiction as you could get with people of different eras flung into each other. She adds, "These contrasts are what initially drew me on. They gave the war a hint of the fantastic, or at least of the darkly surreal. Some of the most indelible literary images to come out of the war did not find expression in historical tomes or works of realistic fiction, but rather crept their way into fantasy and horror."

[00:01:41.260] - Beth

Arden adds to this dark landscape with the novel's explorations of Did you see a new hell, too? Despite these hellish landscapes, both siblings do find love. Freddie with a wounded German soldier, Hans Winter, and Laura with the surgeon, Steven Jones. Okay, so to start off, we have to introduce our... One of our favorites, Bayley.

[00:02:07.800] - Emma

Yes, we love her. She's been referenced as a friend of the pod, probably on more episodes than anything. I'm so honored.

[00:02:14.480] - Beth

She's one of the smartest creators. I feel sane when I encounter her videos in the social media landscape. You can find her on TikTok and most other platforms at Bayley reads books. I will link all of this. Thanks for coming back, Bayley. I feel like our first episode, we just threw you in the deep water. We're like, all right, here's the theme, multiple books. We're talking about cheating, and you handled it. It's one of my favorite episodes.

[00:02:44.490] - Emma

Yeah, I love that episode. But after we started inviting... Bayley was our first guest ever, and after we instead invited more guests to do single book episodes, we were like, wow, we gave Bayley a lot of work.

[00:02:54.430] - Bayley

I had so much fun. I liked that there were a lot of books because I felt like I didn't have to think too many thoughts about just one book. It worked really well for me.

[00:03:03.470] - Beth

You also had strong feelings about the same. That's why we were like, Bayley has smart thoughts on this, so we want her to come on here and talk about it.

[00:03:10.670] - Bayley

I did like the topic, but thank you for having me back. I'm delighted. And I think you all are smart and fun, and I'm glad that you think similarly.

[00:03:21.590] - Beth

I need to add Chels is also gone again. They are measuring England's Duke to see who is actually the tallest. Also, they might be writing a book, but you can decide what is actually going on.

[00:03:38.550] - Emma

Subscribe to the Loose Cravat for more details as they come out from our Duke measurer themselves.

[00:03:44.750] - Beth

Great. So that we're all on the same page, I will give a plot summary, and then we will jump into our discussion.

[00:03:52.140] - Beth

On December sixth, 1917, in the Halifax Harbor, the SS Mont Blanc collided with the outbound Norwegian SS Imo. The Monte Blanc caught fire and exploded, resulting in the deaths of nearly 2,000 people and injuring 9,000 others. This disaster sets the stage for the warm hands of ghosts. In the book, a month later, in January 1918, Laura Ivan, a discharged nurse, receives a package meant for her parents who have tragically died in the explosion. They're the effects of her 21-year-old brother, Freddie, who is currently fighting in Belgium. She finds the box strange as she has received no death notice. She currently works as a nurse companion for a family, the Parkies, who put on seances, something the text notes has grown as an industry in 1918. As she walks further into the house, she hears a seance and the calls to know the fate of a Mr. James Shaw or Jimmy. The medium misinterpret Laura's footsteps as Jimmy's. Jimmy's mother yanks open the door and crashes into Laura. This is Mrs. Penelope Shaw or Pim. As they introduce themselves, Pim relates that Jimmy went missing at Passchendaele. Laura sits down to join them and they ask the Ouija board again, Where is Jimmy?

[00:05:19.110] - Beth

Dead, said the Ouija board, but he's alive. Who's alive, demanded Clotilde. Fred, said the planchet. Freddie, Fred, to find, find, find. Laura leaves the room. She enters the kitchen where she goes through the box and pulls up Freddie's stained jacket and identity tags. Overwhelmed, she picks up a Bible on a whim and opens to the Book of Revelation where she reads, For the devil has come down to you, having a great wrath, because he knows he has a short time. Further in the box, she finds a postcard from Bayou in Germany with writing on the that says, I will bring him back if I can. If I don't and the war is over, you must ask... With the rest blotted out by a stain. Passchendaele Ridge, Flanders, Belgium, November 1917. We jump to another timeline and place for Freddie's chapters. He wakes in the dark with a half memory of standing at the door of a pill box, one that must have overturned and trapped him. He calls out with no answer for a few moments when a voice answers back in English. After some conversation, they introduce themselves. Hans Winter is a German's name.

[00:06:41.250] - Beth

Freddie reaches for him, Winter, mostly to not feel alone. Halifax, Nova Scotia. January to February 1918. Laura reaches out to the Red Cross to confirm Freddie's death. They reply that he is missing in action and presumed dead following the the King of Passchindale Ridge. Pim's son, Jimmy Shaw, is missing from the same place. Laura receives a letter from Kate White, who had worked on Laura's mobile ambulance at Brand Hook. The letter relates the story of a patient who believed to have seen a beloved captain who had been dead for three years. She encourages Laura to not give up hope. Pim sends over a note and invites Laura to tea. Passchendaele Ridge, Flanders, November 1917. Freddie and Winter talk a bit. Freddie ascertains that Winter is injured, and he wraps his arm. They share more about each other. Winter is 35. He lived in England working as a waiter and learned English. He has a family farm back in Bayonne that he's given to a cousin who will give it back if winter comes home. Freddie says he worked as a harbor clerk and wrote terrible poetry and painted pictures. Then he thought that even useless words written for another the world were better than the silence.

[00:08:02.870] - Beth

He licked his dry lips and said, Remember Paradise Lost? ' After the fall, Satan woke up in the dark. My mother used to say that the devil limps because he fell from heaven. They fall silent again after they hear an explosion outside of the pill box. Halifax, Nova Scotia, February 1918. At tea with him, Laura Ivan meets Mary Borden, who founded a private aid station in Belgium. Mary mentions how Laura received the Croix-à-Tagaire in 1915. Laura thinks about how she doesn't want a memento of the war and how she doesn't want to go back, but she can't stop thinking of the postcard. Passchendaele Ridge, Flanders, November 1917. Winter and Freddie decide to take their way out after discovering mud. Halifax, Nova Scotia, February 1918. Laura has a nightmare and wakes up to go to the kitchen. She finds the three parky women she tends to there. Almost like the fates, Agatha says they don't often give advice, but that she will tell Laura three things that are true. First, Freddie is alive. Second, she has to go to him. And third, that wars are stark things, but not this time, and that she will have trouble identifying her enemies.

[00:09:28.840] - Beth

Laura slips out into the evening air, only to see Mary Borden, who agrees to accompany Laura to Belgium. Pim discovers the plan and tells Laura she's coming, too. No man's land, Ypres, Salliant. November 1917. Freddie and Winter break free and struggle to find their way in the darkness. Freddie credits Winter with keeping him alive. But more, it was Winter's stoic presence, the splash of his footsteps, walking near enough to touch that kept him moving. The pair fall into a shell hole with another Canadian soldier who falls into Winter, who swears reflexively in German. The Canadian soldier takes up his baanet to hit Winter, and Freddie tackles the Canadian soldier and holds him down and kills him. After realizing he's killed a fellow countryman, Freddie panics. Winter consults him and says, We're behind your lines. I'm your prisoner, Ivan. Freddie offers to let him go, to go back to his side, and Winter reiterates he's Ivan's prisoner. Freddie vows, I won't let you die. London, England, March 1918. Mary, Pim, and Laura arrive. Mary receives an invitation from General Gage to dinner. Laura seems bothered by this and later reveals it was General Gage who had sent her to Brand Hook.

[00:10:56.210] - Beth

They put the mobile hospital next to munitions in the hopes Fritz would bombed there because of the presence of the hospital. They go to dinner and meet the general. Another soldier, Young, introduces himself saying he met Laura in 1915 where she helped him. During dinner, a man takes ill. Later, they make it to Calais, then to Dunkirk. Laura becomes sick as well. While they ride on the lorry, it's the first time they hear of the Fiddler, a ghost. Between Passchendaele Ridge and Ypres, November 1917. Freddie and Winter come across a soldier begging for death. He's a British Infantrymen, and they help him, so now the three of them make their way across no man's land. Between Dunkirk and Kutov, March 1918. Laura, Pim, and Mary's Lorry narrowly misses a bomb that lands on the road. They take cover and discover their driver has died. The Lorry is unusable, so the trio treks out on their and discovers the Hotel de Roy. As they enter, everyone is transfixed on a man playing the violin. The man wore a shabby civilian suit. He had a sharp jaw, arching bones. Bow curves of dissipation gouged lines around his mouth.

[00:12:18.380] - Beth

He was playing the violin flawlessly. Silky, grave, strangely familiar, the music poured like water from between fingers and seemed to banish everything outside itself. Later, he introduces himself as Follend. Pim asks why all the men are staring in a mirror. Why, he replied lightly, that mirror will show you your heart's desire. After talking for a bit, Laura looks in the mirror, sees Freddie, and screams. Hellfire Corner, Ypres, Flanders, Belgium. November 1917. As Freddie, Winter and the British Infantrymen get closer to the hospital, Freddie realizes that the doctors won't tend to Winter or give him the medical attention his arm needs. He also realizes Winter knows this and stayed with him anyway. When they get to the hospital, Freddie helps the British soldier who's diagnosed with shell shock. Then another soldier clocks Winter as the enemy, and before his shouting gets too out of hand, a shell bursts on the ramparts, and the distraction is enough to get Winter out of there. Freddie and Winter argue a bit, and Freddie says he won't leave Winter. They run into Faland , who offers a bolt hole for a day. Winter says no, but Freddie says yes, so they go with Faland .

[00:13:40.810] - Beth

Between Dunkirk and Kutov, and Parts Unknown, March 1918. Laura doesn't remember the previous night very well. The hotel they wake up and looks run down versus how it looked the night before. They can't find Faland . They leave the hotel and Laura has a fever. They hitchhike and a unit of sappers picks them up. They talk for a bit about the hotel and someone says that who they're describing, Faland , matches the description of the Fiddler or the Devil. A man can offer up his memories to him and no one ever sees that man again. They make it to Kutov, where we meet an American doctor, Steven Jones. He brusquely informs Laura she has pneumonia. Ypres to Brandhook, Flanders, Belgium, November 1917. Freddie and Winter wake to find Faland gone. They make it to the hospital at Brand Hook to look for Laura, but she's not there. Freddie tells Winter to pretend to not know English and give Winter his tags. Freddie speaks with Laura's friend, Kate White, saying Winter is a German who has the tags of a man named Wilfred Iven. Kate takes Winter and Freddie sees Faland. He goes to him.

[00:14:54.410] - Beth

Chateau Coutave, Flanders, Belgium. March 1918. Jones checks Laura over and an orderly makes a comment about his weak bedside manner. He also notes Laura's scarred hands and says she'll be arthritic in five years. She says she's much recovered, so he asks her to join him on his rounds. Later, she gets a letter from Kate saying that she met a friend of hers. Brandhuck and parts unknown. Flanders, Belgium, November 1917. Friny asks Faland if he can go with him. Faland And Féin raise both brows. That is the behavior of a very bad soldier indeed. You've comforted your enemy, and now you will desert your country? Enemy? Was Germany his enemy? In the last few days, Germany had become winter, breathing with him in the dark. Freddie said, Germany didn't put my sister's hospital next to a munitions dump. Valin says he has fees, to which Freddie responds he has nothing. Valin says to tell him a story every night, good or bad, only one that is true. When Freddie asks why, Valin responds for inspiration. In Valin's mirror, Freddie sees Laura taking care of Winter, who both look happy. They turn in the mirror and look at him in in medicine.

[00:16:17.130] - Beth

Chateau Coutave, Flanders, Belgium, March 1918. Laura wakes to screaming. She finds a few things, but one of them is an unconscious soldier. Jones is there and he says he needs blood. An order appears with a jar of blood, something Laura has never seen before. They only store O negative and have come up with a way to store the blood so it won't go bad. After Jones explains the method, Laura asks, Doctor, will you show me how to use the tubing? Naturally, said Jones, I have to dazzle you somehow, Ivan. I'll never win. A Croix de Guerre. Faland 's Hotel, Parts Unkown, Flanders, Belgium, Winter of 1917 to 1918. Freddie stays at Faland's Hotel, trading memories and losing them to feed Faland's music. Faland's voice dropped effortlessly, took on an intimacy that made Freddie's whole body quake. You asked me once why I'm here. Well, I shall ask you, why are you here? Don't you know? Freddie's eyes never left Faland's face. Because out there, you can give up every piece of your self for nothing. Let the mud swallow you, nameless and naked. Or you can sell yourself to me, story by story, for all the delights of peace.

[00:17:35.310] - Beth

There are two evils, his voice turned dry, and I am the lesser. Besides, where would you go? The words seemed to drop down Freddie's body in Pierce's heart. Imagine for a moment that your sister were not dead. Do you think for even an instant that she'd be glad to see you? Chateau Coutave, Flanders, Belgium. March to April, 1918. Mary teaches Laura to ride a motorcycle. Young arrives on horseback with news of a loose German spy. Young has a crush on Pim, and Pim wants to try and contact Falen, although Laura and Mary think it's a bad idea. Laura worries and consults with Jones about Faland . He responds, Don't science me, Ivan. Magic's just science we don't understand. He then further cautions Laura against leaving as she's still recovering, although there's more sentiment behind it than doctorly care. Mendingham Casualty Clearing Station, Flanders, Belgium. April 1918. Laura meets up with her friend and former mentor, Kate. Kate tells Laura about caring for Winter, amputating his arm in his eventual confession that Freddie died in a shell hole. However, Kate says while he slept, he'd say Freddie wasn't dead. Pauper Flanders, Belgium, April 1918. Laura finds an advertisement in a newspaper for the celebrated violinist, Faland.

[00:19:10.570] - Beth

Walking down the street, she sees a disturbing figure. Young, the soldier who has a crush on Pim, asks her if she just saw the German spy, the disturbing figure. He accompanies her back to HQ, and when they enter, Laura sees General Gage speaking with Pim. Watching out the window, a crowd forms in the square and Laura sees Winter. Heading down to the street and through the crowd, she meets up with Winter and asks if her brother is alive. Winter runs before the military police can grab him. Later, Laura asks Pim if she has found Faland , and him, omits she hasn't. Chateau Coutave, Flanders, Belgium, April 1918. Winter, wounded, shows up at the hospital where Laura is. When Pim sees Winter, she thinks that's her son, Jimmy. Laura aids Winter, who manages to say that Freddie is with Faland . She asks him how to find Faland , and Winter says, You have to ask the ghosts. Sometime later in the main ward, Laura hears a gun go off. She sees Winter and Pim struggling for the gun. A bullet passes by General Gage. Winter wins the gun and then says, I'll do it again. General Gage shouts to save Winter, presumably so he can get information from him.

[00:20:28.660] - Beth

Jones goes to Winter. Laura steps outside into the cemetery. She sees Faland by the gate and asks for her brother. They go to him. Freddie doesn't think she's real at first. Then he tells her that he's done too many horrible things to go back. Walking through Faland's labyrinthian hotel, Laura and Freddie escape. The final thing that happens after Laura and Freddie are settled back at the chateau is Pim kills General Gage. I warn you, young woman, said Gage, Stop this nonsense at once, or Or, said Pim in a low, terrible voice, You'll kill me, just like Jimmy. The air seemed to leave the room. He's not worth it, echoed Laura. Maybe not, said Pim, and pulled the trigger. General Gage dies, Laura realizes Winter had initially stopped Pim from murdering General Gage. Pim tells Laura Jimmy had run away from Passchendaele, although the military caught him. They sentenced Jimmy to death firing squad. Before Jimmy's death, General Gage tells him he has to die so other men wouldn't run, that it was for the greater cause. General Gage told Pim, this is a consolation to say Jimmy hadn't died in vain. Pim decides to go with Falland.

[00:21:48.600] - Beth

Laura needs to head back home, and Jones has to stay with the army. Laura tells Jones to come and find her after the war, which he does. Winter and Freddie settle together in Cape Breton.

[00:22:01.900] - Beth

So I just wanted to see what everyone's knowledge or interactions with Katherine Arden have been. I have read the Winter Night trilogy, and I really liked the fairytale-esque approach to fantasy. I feel like only Arden, and Naomi Novik, and Shannon Chakrabarty are the only authors I've read that are fantasy authors in the past five years. So I feel like that says a lot as a complement Arden. Arden pairs utilitarian writing with these dreamy settings, and that works really well for me. Bayley pitched us three books that were all World War I settings, and we picked this because Bayley and other pod favorite, Hayley, had rated it five stars. So double recommendation. Plus, this is outside our usual zone, and I like the idea of us potentially having a more setting-focused discussion, because with romance, it's very character-driven in focus. So we about character a lot. But yeah, I just wanted to know what everyone's experience with Katherine Arden is. And Bayley, if you could just tell us why you pitched us this book.

[00:23:10.620] - Bayley

So I totally agree that Katherine Arden is Naomi Novik-ish I definitely was thinking about Spinning Silver and Uprooted while reading this. They're both very good. But I'd only read The Bear and the Nightingale before I read this the first time. And I would really like to have a great reason why I was pitching this to you guys, but I just like it, and I wanted my buddies to talk to me about it.

[00:23:35.460] - Beth

That's the perfect reason. Yeah.

[00:23:37.320] - Emma

It's like the whole premise of the podcast.

[00:23:39.070] - Bayley

And for the listeners, I am aware that this is not a historical romance, but they said it was okay. So hopefully that is fine. I think it is.

[00:23:49.870] - Emma

It is historical in its setting. And also there are two happily ever afters. And I would argue that the love stories, maybe they're not central, but I think a relationship is central to it. And I think there's enough structures that are like historical romance. I think the dual POV, dual timeline, that's very historical romance. So I'm always arguing for a wide umbrella of what counts as romance. And so I think it's a...

[00:24:15.330] - Bayley

You are?

[00:24:15.940] - Emma

Yes. Beth equated this to my non-romance romance series on my Substack, where I take something that's not a romance novel and talk about it like it is a romance novel. Because I think there's romance everywhere, and I want romance to be as big and expansive as any one reader wants it to be, basically.

[00:24:33.340] - Beth

Yeah. And every time I read one of your articles, I'm like, yes, this is a romance. Like, baseball is a romance. Like the whole sport, actually. Yes.

[00:24:41.590] - Emma

So this was a total curveball for me. I never heard of Arden before, except maybe, I mean, two of my best book friends have gave it five stars on Goodreads, so I'm sure I think it's in the cover before, but I never thought about picking it up because I just... I don't normally pick up fantasy books of any stripe. Mostly Maybe because I hate when a character comes in to explain something about a magic system. Like when there's some ingenue who doesn't know what's going on and then some seer or magic tree comes in and it's like, This is what's going on. I can't stand it. That was when I gave up on ACOTAR. When that thing comes and explains to Feyre something new again.

[00:25:18.700] - Bayley

She is a magic tree! I was going to ask you where a magic tree book was.

[00:25:22.510] - Emma

I just always throw my hands up. I'm like, I guess this is what's happening. That does not happen here because I think Arden... I don't know how her books are as far as magic systems go, but I don't know enough about the language of fantasy to describe this. But to me, this reads a lot like magic realism, which I do really like, in part because magic realism is not super invested in explaining systems. There's some quote about magic realism where it's about evoking emotions rather than expressing them. And so it's like trying to elicit a response. And so explaining a magic system is never going to elicit a response that's emotional, except maybe it's me being like, I don't want to read this book anymore. So I think I I like that. I think Beth and Bayley both call this, we'll call this a fantasy book throughout the episode. But it to me really reads like magic realism.

[00:26:07.860] - Beth

This one is not really fantasy. It's like a hint of fantasy.

[00:26:12.010] - Emma

Yeah, I wasn't sure. I kept seeing that word used and I was like, I don't know enough about fantasy to refute it. Or how it's marketed and it's like, I don't want to step on another genre's toes. But I picked it because I was happy to pick it because I trust Bayley. But really, I was like, this doesn't read the fantasy books that I've started and stopped that have been published in the past 10 years. I mean, also it's literally set in a real life historical setting, which always interests me more than a made up world.

[00:26:40.970] - Bayley

I definitely, I think of it as fantasy, but it's definitely like a soft magic system, which I feel like maybe that is helpful to you, which soft magic and magical realism, like those are similar terms. They probably have lots of overlap. And it's historical fantasy, so that makes it a little bit less We're not going to... I was going to say Middle-earth, but that's also about this war.

[00:27:05.690] - Emma

I do like Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings is my one exception. Every time I read a fantasy book that's not Lord of the Rings, I'm like, Why am I not reading Lord of the Rings?

[00:27:15.080] - Beth

Okay. So I'm going to refer back to the quote I referenced in my intro, which comes from Arden's author note. So I wanted to talk a little bit about this tension between the old and the new. And I will break the question into in two different ways. First, about the setting. So from the author's note, It was a time of shocking juxtapositions. Artillery could kill from 75 miles away, yet army still communicated via messenger pigeon. Suits of armor went up against machine guns. Calvary charged at tanks. Combat nurses wore corsets and carried gas masks. Primitive hand-to-hand combat with bayonets and trench knives, alternated with precisely calibrated artillery barrages. And famously, generals ran the war from luxurious French chateaux. Well, their men, a scant few miles away, slept in wet, corpse-ridden trenches. This mix of old and new clearly fascinates Arden. Near the end of the book, Laura, Winter, and Freddie move back to Halifax. Laura receives a letter from Kate that says, It feels like the end, but people are still dying. Then from the narrative, we get this. They were. People died and died and died that summer from influenza and hunger and war.

[00:28:38.610] - Beth

The horsemen galloped disembodied and the old world writhed in torment, giving birth to the new. I think Arden integrates this tension between the old and new, not only in her setting, but in her characters. I'm going to read another scene, and this is at the part where Laura comes and saves Freddy from Faland. For long moments, he was silent. She thought he wouldn't answer. Then his ragged nail, fingertips came up and blotted her wet face. Laura, I'm here, she whisper. I'm not the same. You don't love me. The Freddie you loved, he died. I don't care. I'm a traitor, he whisper. I remember that I did a terrible thing. I killed. His voice stutter. I ran. I'm not brave. You don't have to be. Not me. So take from this what you will. And I just wanted to talk about this clash of old and new in the setting or the time period or the character.

[00:29:43.140] - Bayley

I really love that quote. I don't I was affected by it. I was like, I just read the book. I don't know why.

[00:29:47.870] - Beth

It's a heartrending scene. And I think that's true. I don't know if you guys think about this a lot, because I've moved away from home. And I think of, I'm not that person of who I was when I left. But when I go home, I feel like that's who people see me as. I feel like that idea of we are new selves. I think tragedy and trauma can really obviously shape a person. Yeah, that really struck me when Freddie said that. I think all the characters feel that to a certain degree. You're not the same after something like that.

[00:30:24.460] - Emma

You get all those moments of... Because you're on the different timelines with each other. You get all these moments of the other sibling thinking about... I guess Freddie thinks Laura is dead. So he thinks of her as in amber, and then Laura also thinks Freddie is dead. And so I think they both think they're going to disappoint the other one because they've thought of this person as stuck that happens. I think especially when a sibling dies or a young person dies, that they get stuck at this age. It's so young that you're like, they're calcified. I think Laura is saying that for Freddie, but I think having been with Laura for so long, it's like, Laura's It's also changed so much. I imagine she's also telling herself this a little bit.

[00:31:04.590] - Bayley

When Freddie is picturing Laura, he's picturing her as a child, and then slowly, as he gets little glimpses of her, he's aging her up, which I thought was interesting.

[00:31:14.550] - Emma

Yeah, I feel like so many of the memories he tells Faland first, the first memory he tells Faland is about Laura stealing him ice cream.

[00:31:20.590] - Beth

Yeah.

[00:31:21.170] - Emma

I love that one.

[00:31:22.160] - Beth

She was twelve years old and she didn't know what she was doing. She was just going to march in there. Yeah, it's a cute memory.

[00:31:27.840] - Emma

Yeah, I think that's also true. When you think of your siblings, your core memories of them are them as children. Even for someone who are still close with their siblings as adults or anything, it's like you still think of them as you're the closest you were ever with your siblings when you were younger a lot of the time.

[00:31:44.060] - Beth

I feel like I say this a lot because I feel readers of romance sometimes don't consider this, where it's hard to change relationships. I see siblings as one of the hardest ones to change because there's so much there. If you purposely trying to change the dynamic of a relationship, I find that so difficult. I think it's very difficult to change.

[00:32:07.310] - Emma

We've done two sibling heavy episodes in a row now with Countess Conspiracy in this one. Oh, yeah. I think Countess Conspiracy also really explores that. It does. One of the sibling relationships, and it changes dramatically, and the other one doesn't. I guess Lily and Violet do change, but to the detriment, it doesn't improve. We can actually talk about World War One. Sorry, we're looking at it for our field.

[00:32:30.000] - Bayley

The tension is totally one of those aspects of World War One media that is a certain discussion point. It's really fascinating and it's factual. Hearing that there was chain mail and tanks, it is wild, and it's a fertile ground for fiction. It is so interesting and tragic that so many people in power were trying to prepare basically to fight a, and I know that this is both a very popular talking point, and reductive Napoleonic war, despite all the technological advances in the century in between them. I think this contrast is partly why World War I, and just the interwar period in general, is a really solid time period for a ghost story because you have that contrast and the obvious horror and tragedy that you need for ghosts. But with Resolution, you continue to be haunted of the knowledge of what is to come in a way that I think adds a lot of emotion. You know that this happens again soon and on a much larger scale. And obviously, you can make similar arguments about other points in time that have closely spaced out atrocities. But it's just impossible to consume World War I content and not be thinking about what is going to happen in 20 years to the world that is birthed by this war.

[00:33:45.210] - Emma

I was thinking about this with our, Think of England episode because that had a Boar War veteran, and that's definitely the episode we've done that's the closest to World War I. And we talk about that a little bit with Mel in that episode. That's like maybe this is the latest romance because we've talked before, it's like how romance for WWI, Bayley has a video about this, romances for WWI or immediately before WWI are very hard to write because you have the sense that there's a very likely chance that there's a male character in it, they're going to go to war or even female characters might be nurses. It's this scale of horror. The 19th century, you have this ending point in the long 19th century, and it's all these periods that have politics and have trauma in them in the 19th century. I think it's hard for, maybe because we're so close to it at the scale of the violence, we just noticed there are romances that are set during this period. I feel like we also had one, a veteran during the Crimean War, and now I'm realizing I think that's during Wyckerley is that there's a Crimean War veteran in Wyckerley.

[00:34:40.750] - Emma

We were talking about this during the Boar War in the way that it felt like a harbinger for a new type of warfare. Boar War is this prequel to War War One with some of the guerrilla warfare aspects that turn into trench warfare, and then all this stuff, the change in how they put men on the field and leads to the shell-shocked victims. It also some medical advances that, again, lead to more people surviving and being shell-shocked instead instead of just dying. But then I also was thinking about our Waterloo episode and the way that people talked about Waterloo, there's also this aspect of people assess the Peninsular War. That was the Peninsular War because Spain and Portugal are so close to England. A lot of women and families biouvacked with the soldiers. There was this other new level of intimacy with war that affects how people talk about that war. Or Waterloo because Waterloo, the battle was so close to essentially a tourist location for English people in Belgium. People have been at a ball a few days earlier, and then they are the people who go to the battlefield to attend the soldiers.

[00:35:37.050] - Emma

I don't mean bring this up to minimize the realities of World War I and how horrifying they are, but more that this brave new world framing that, they use that phrase in this book, always seems like a way for people to deal with something like war that is inherently counter to humanity's project, which is to sustain itself. When you are doing war, I think sometimes these self-narratives, they You have to say, this war is different than every other war before it in a way that helps you cope with it, because it's like, if it wasn't different at this time, how could we send people off to go do this? There has to be something new and terrible about it. I think also thinking about going from Napoleon to World War I. Bayley said it's a reductive take, but I think World War I, you could argue, is a Napoleonic war. Not even just in the way that it's measured, but this is the politics that are the fallout of World War I, which I know about through them as consequences to Napoleon, are the consequences of Napoleon. Napoleon leaves this power vacuum for the 19th century in Central Europe that leads to this fracturing of these alliances that leads to World War I.

[00:36:44.100] - Emma

So it's both Napoleonic politically, but also I think you can think about the 19th century, we can put all these wars. We have the Napoleonic War, the Crimean War, the Boar War and the World War I. It's still a pretty short period of time. World War I is a century after Waterloo. That's not that long in terms of human history. And so we have this scale of advancement, but not that much change in generations or connections between people. It's much smaller. We talked about this in our medieval episodes, how large the scale of medieval romance is. Sometimes 100 years that we're talking about when we're talking about medieval romances. A World War I romance we class as very different than a regency romance, but that's so close to each other. It's just a recency bias, but I don't know exactly where I'm going with this, but I think I've made my point.

[00:37:28.210] - Beth

No, I have a conclusion.

[00:37:29.700] - Bayley

I think you've made an excellent point.

[00:37:31.520] - Beth

No, I liked what you mentioned about how they talk about how every war is almost like the brave new world framing. But I feel like war is often a site of a lot of technological advancement, every war, because they have to be like, Okay, we have all these injured people. We have this new warfare that we need to integrate. So I feel like this is a very common thing in history that war is at the forefront of changing the world and technology and everything. Yeah.

[00:38:20.440] - Emma

And we see that in the book with the blood transfusion. You're more willing to take risk for medical advancement when you don't have another option.

[00:38:28.690] - Bayley

Yeah. I just wanted to add that interestingly about the First World War, this is where we get a lot of our facial reconstruction surgery things that are still used because so many people were getting horrible face injuries and then living because of things like blood transfusion and antiseptic.

[00:38:44.880] - Beth

So I think this segues nicely into me literally just being like, Hey, Bayley, can you just talk about the research of this book and info dump a little bit? We're very pro-info-dump on this podcast.

[00:38:56.290] - Bayley

I'm very glad because I have a lot do you have info dumping to do. Please tell me if it's too much.

[00:39:02.820] - Beth

No, please go. Everything's going to be perfect. Okay.

[00:39:05.500] - Bayley

I was really focused while reading on how deeply researched this book seems to be. Arden talks about it in her author's note, and I just think it's very apparent while you're reading. The world is so well fleshed out, and I thought that she did a good job of relaying lots of historical details without it feeling dry. Little instances explaining to the audience how the soldier's IDs looked and were meant to function by having Laura remark that it was weird that she received both of the ID disks when she was only supposed to receive one because the other one is supposed to stay on the body. Freddie's thinking of Winter as Fritz before we're given his name or a British soldier calling a Frenchman a frog while gossiping. Winter, scolding Freddie for dropping good food by referring to the turn of winter, which were food shortages in Germany as a result of the blockades. Or him talking about how terrible conditions are on Freddie's side of the line because German trenches were much better constructed. Or having the Wipers Times make an appearance because that was how many British holders said, Ypres.

[00:40:06.450] - Beth

I love that.

[00:40:08.510] - Bayley

I think it's so fun. That's my favorite little historical thing. Just a bunch of stories.

[00:40:13.030] - Emma

Did I make this up or was that also a bathroom joke?

[00:40:15.730] - Bayley

It's probably...

[00:40:16.690] - Emma

It could be. Okay. I was like, Is that a detail that was in the book or did I just invent that?

[00:40:20.800] - Bayley

I don't know.

[00:40:22.020] - Emma

I just assumed that they were using the newspaper to wipe themselves. And I was like, Oh, it's a pun.

[00:40:27.620] - Bayley

It could be a pun. And I just I didn't notice.

[00:40:30.310] - Emma

But now I'm realizing. I was like, Do I just have a bad potty sense of humor? And I was like, I don't think that was in the book.

[00:40:36.040] - Bayley

Well, it's like a real historical... That's what they really called their little newspaper. So I'm sure it probably did have a double entendre joke, and I just never picked up on it. Just a bunch of examples of characters passing information to the audience without dropping it in a wall of text, which I do understand is what I'm currently doing.

[00:40:57.300] - Emma

This is fascinating.

[00:41:00.120] - Bayley

And then I think she scales it up to following what I think is an accurate timeline and also including real generals, and Mary Borden is a real person. And then Freddie, while stuck in a pill box, is thinking about touching a dead man's hand and recalling a human hand sticking out of a trench wall. I've encountered this story in Accounts of Trench Life, I think, specifically at Vimy Ridge, which I don't think is that far from this, but I would need to consult a map again, where there's a man's hand that is referred to as Jack by the soldiers, and shaking the hand was a superstition that would guarantee that you would return alive. Arden doesn't use this superstition in her story, but she uses many actual legends, soldiers either believed or spread while building towards the fantastical elements that she adds. Things like making reference to the angel at Mons or Wild Men in No Man's Land or tales of outlandish and impractical cruelty from the other side. I could go on to probably a very boring degree, but I think that the attention to detail let me project historical elements onto the narrative that I was unsure if they were intended or not.

[00:42:07.060] - Bayley

Pim's storyline really reminded me of the war tourism industry that boomed postwar, appealing to war widows and families of dead soldiers to go to the places where their loved ones were last alive. Or, and this one is probably intentional, when Freddie and Winter stay together and pick a direction in no man's land and just hope that whatever side they end up on, they can come up with a plan. I was thinking about how I had read that soldiers in prisoner war camps run by the British were more likely to have food to feed you in comparison to German camps. But on the Allied side, it was highly dependent on who was in charge of your individual section of the front line, whether or not you were even allowed to take prisoners. So oftentimes, depending on who it was, you would just kill the person that you would otherwise be taking prisoner. And obviously, you don't need to be thinking that for that part of the book to be tense. You know that mistreatment and death are possibilities in either direction, but it's just fun to fill in the spaces. It did read to me like Arden is trying to appeal to both readers very invested in history and readers who just want to have enough detail for the world to feel real.

[00:43:18.710] - Bayley

But I would be really interested to hear if the historical world building worked well for you all.

[00:43:24.290] - Emma

Yes. I guess reading this book, I realized how little I know about World War I, which I've already referenced. I blame this on the fact that it was denied the opportunity to take AP Euro in high school, which is also why I got really into Napoleon, because I realized I knew nothing about Napoleon. And so that's why... Now I know so much about Napoleon, so maybe World War One will be my next thing.

[00:43:40.570] - Bayley

I was also denied the opportunity to take AP Euro in high school.

[00:43:45.290] - Emma

Yeah, it's like, you don't let us take it. And then now we have these special interests and we have to go on podcast. Like, look what you wrought. But I do think Arden did a good job for me as a reader with that much context, especially if you're in a writing style, which is something I don't see a lot in romance. And This was not written like a romance... The style of the writing was not very genre romance to me. It's something a few people on Goodreads complained about. But she has this impressionistic way of describing settings and emotions that I think she does partially because it's such a close POV with both Laura and Freddie. When they're disjointed, their thoughts become disjointed. The sentences become choppy, or I guess can seem choppy, or that you're not getting as many details. I I saw some people describing the setting as vague, and I was like, I think what you mean is that the room that someone is in is not described in great detail. That's what you mean by the setting? It was like, actually, the setting is incredibly specific because she's grounding it in these little details that are historical, I think it works really well to have maybe zoom out a little bit.

[00:44:47.510] - Emma

Because again, when you enter a room, you're not describing the room to yourself. But in a romance, especially historical romance, where we want those aesthetic details, I think a lot of authors languish over those. And I really enjoy those details a lot. But yeah, there were times when something would happen, I would realize I didn't know the layout of the room that they were in. But also I was fine with that because, again, Laura is not thinking about the layout of the room when she enters it. And we really are very tight on our POV characters in a way that I think sometimes happens in romance, but not necessarily all the time.

[00:45:20.340] - Beth

Well, I will just echo what you said, because I also don't feel like I have a ton of familiarity with World War One as a setting, but I didn't feel like I had a lesser experience because I didn't know as much. So I feel like she's able to write to a Bayley who knows more and is picking up on more references, but I don't feel like I've lost out on anything because I didn't know that General Gage was an actual general. Do you know what I mean? So I think that's really talented writing to meet readers at multiple levels. And then, yeah, I liked what you said about the tight POV. I think it also speaks to just the The mental state that Laura and Freddie are in, it is impressionistic. They are just barely making it. Do you know what I mean? It just would feel weird, I think, for Laura to enter a room and be like, And there was yellow walls with flowered curtains and this flooring. It would be strange, I think, and it would be a little tonally dissonant.

[00:46:22.170] - Emma

Yeah. There were parts pretty early in the book, I was like, How are any of these people standing up straight? You realize that Laura's parents are dead and how they died? I was like, This is... It was crazy to me. I was like, How is she not screaming all the time? How is she comforting Pim in this moment? I was like, I... Which also, it's hard for me to imagine, but also, obviously, people lived through World War One and did everyday tasks. You're asking a lot of her if you're asking her to give you a lot of narrative structure.

[00:46:55.230] - Bayley

Please tell me what chair you're sitting on while you're dealing with this grief.

[00:46:59.210] - Beth

Right. It was also interesting. I was texting Bayley because I, as people may or may not know, I am Canadian. I grew up in Calgary, which is just north of Montana. It's in the province of Alberta. But I also did live in Nova Scotia. That's the province that Halifax is in for six or seven years of my life. And I think wherever you lived, you would have learned this history because you learn your country's history. So I had to ask a couple of people, Did you ever learn about the Halifax explosion? How far was that saturation? You know what I mean? And that's the referencing back to the plot summary. That was happened on December sixth, and the two ships collied and exploded. It was devastating and really shaped the people there. It's horrific. And like Emma said, I don't know, both her parents died. Also, just the effect in her community, the immediately surrounding community. How are you functioning after that?

[00:48:02.930] - Emma

Yeah, because I guess you see Laura at the hospital. And so it's like, yeah, there are people who need to be treated to, and she's dealing with that. But then also the fact that the parties are just doing small talk with her, and it's Yeah. How are any of you doing this right now? I know where Halifax is. I knew this, but I think I was so... Because I know Beth. I think if Beth is from Western Canada, in my mind, I was like, it's weird that they're in Western Canada. I was like, it'll take them a while to to England. And I was like, it's not in Western Canada. Beth is from Western Canada. Halifax is on the East Coast. But I was like, that's so weird. I was like, it's going to take a minute to get there. And I was like, no, you're just confusing your Canadians.

[00:48:41.720] - Bayley

When Beth was texting me, she sent me an excellent public service announcement video that they, apparently, sometimes showed in commercial slots about the Halifax explosion. I also called it the Mont Blanc explosion and was corrected that that is not the correct parlance. So I have updated my language.

[00:49:00.400] - Beth

No, you're fine. It just was an interesting thing of what you would know it from and what I learned about growing up. So for any Canadians listening, it was like those Our Heritage commercials that would come on. And it'd be a minute of a quick like, This is about Canada. And so I showed one. I think it's about a train conductor. He stops a train because he knows that ship's going to explode. But yeah, I'm glad you enjoyed it. It was compelling.

[00:49:25.650] - Bayley

It was cheesy, but it explained the scale very well in one minute.

[00:49:31.440] - Beth

Yeah, I'll put it in the show notes.

[00:49:34.590] - Bayley

I also do wonder if World War One was more popular in pop culture, and this might just be for America, but I've gone to other places, and most places, World War II is the more prominent of the two. But I wonder if the First World War was more prominent in pop culture, if some of the details that Arden included would feel like, trite or banal because it would be like, oh, now we're doing the angel of the months in. So, yeah, I was just thinking about that. I don't think that that would be a critique I would levy at the book, but I don't know.

[00:50:08.210] - Emma

Yeah, that definitely happens with like, War War II and Vietnam media, I think. When a Vietnam movie comes out, you're like, Oh, here's where they're going to play... What's the band?

[00:50:18.700] - Beth

Oh, that song?

[00:50:19.410] - Emma

The Creedence song?

[00:50:20.580] - Beth

Yeah, like the helicopter flying over, and they always play that song.

[00:50:23.370] - Emma

And you're like, Oh, yeah, that's when we're playing it. Or if it's not that song, it's a song that sounds a lot like it. And it's like, Yeah, it's You just have those... It's two different Tom Hanks movies. You have your Saving Private Ryan moments, and you have your Forrest Gump moments for Vietnam. And it's like, Those are your two things. We need Tom Hanks to be in a World War One movie and give us clichés.

[00:50:44.970] - Bayley

I would love for the clichés to happen.

[00:50:46.870] - Beth

I'm sure he's listening, so Tom, can you get on that, please?

[00:50:49.310] - Beth

Tom Hanks.

[00:50:49.920] - Bayley

This might be slightly outside of the point, but in World War One non-fiction media, the big cliché is that there is always a vague description of a young German soldier. And then the paragraph is very long, and you slowly build into the reveal that at the end, in that young man was Adolf Hitler. And that happens in, I think, every non-fiction book I've read about the First World War. It's always vague, and then it name drops. And they all do it, and they love doing it.

[00:51:21.640] - Emma

By the way, that was Hitler.

[00:51:23.610] - Beth

I love that.

[00:51:26.700] - Emma

Got you.

[00:51:30.450] - Beth

We're going to talk a little bit about Faland's role in the story. Throughout the novel, there are rumors of the devil. Here's an explanation from the text. This story comes from an unnamed soldier. The man in the hotel, he's called the Fiddler, that's what all the stories say anyway, can make you forget all of this. His gesture took in the world around them. But what they all say, every story, is those who've drunk with him, heard the music, seeing what he shows and then come back out here, he spat out to the leeward side of the lorry. Well, they're always pining for it. Laura caught the Irish in the speaker's lilting voice. But you only see it once. You can't get back. They say men have gone mad, looking for the fiddler, like they can't ever be happy again. And they say that sometimes a man finds him, said another voice, and no one ever sees that man again. I wouldn't say Arden is heavy be handed with her devil references, but she's very intentional about the fact that she has the devil in the book. She prefaces the book with a quote from Arthur Mackin, And the devil was incarnated and was made man.

[00:52:44.890] - Beth

And then the chapter titles alternate quotes from the Book of Revelation and Paradise Lost, both apocalyptic stories with the devil. Arden referred to her devil as the fiend in an interview, which I thought was interesting. So What do we think of the devil in this book?

[00:53:04.420] - Bayley

I thought the devil was a good character in the book. I think that obviously one of the tragedies of the first all war, as to Emma's point earlier, was that human beings were just being fed into a death machine, and the people in charge would do it over and over again without facing the repercussions themselves directly. And Arden scales that in a way that I thought was really interesting, into watching a single person be slowly apart. Faland presents this as him being the better option and telling Laura that at least I know his name about what he's doing to Freddie. I think this is interesting, and it works well as both a contrast and a mirror. This is a clear example of the old world and the new colliding. But it is also making the tragedy of mass human loss more confrontable by watching it happen within the mind of a single character. I was unbelievably concerned about this while I was reading the first time, so much so that even though I'm typically like a wanting to solve the book reader, I was in no way engaging with trying to figure out what was coming because I was too distressed.

[00:54:08.280] - Bayley

All of my marginalia just says crying or stomach ache, which was funny. Throughout the book, it's mentioned that Freddie is a talented artist, but a bad poet, and he really wants to write good poetry. I found this so charming. And Faland takes this and twists it into Freddie's tragedy. What he deeply wants is to transmute his own experiences into art. And Faland realizes that desire by stripping Freddie's memory. When he is listening to the music Faland plays from Freddie's memories, he thinks the war was there all around them. Things that didn't have proper words. The violin didn't need words. It howled. And I just thought that was really effective.

[00:54:52.010] - Beth

Yeah. I wanted to comment on that part of Freddie's tragedy gets turned into Faland's art Because I think in that... So I've referenced an interview. It's with Katie Fraser interviews Katherine Arden in the website The Bookseller. Anyway, so she turns that in And she sees herself as doing the same thing. She takes this tragedy and she's turning it into art.

[00:55:20.850] - Bayley

That's really interesting.

[00:55:21.980] - Beth

Yes. And I think, I don't know, the Faland character is interesting in that it's like, he's a personal personal double, which I find interesting. I'm thinking of one part in particular. So Faland runs into Freddie and Winter. And Winter turns and says this to Faland, and he says it in German. Apologies to German listeners.. So it's like, I know who you are, is what Winter says to Faland. And then Faland is laughing. He's like, who am I? But what's interesting is with the German you, I mean, you as the pronoun, not the letter. But Du is like you're close to that person. And then sie S, I, E is a more formal. So I just was very... I just like that Arden had that careful attention to detail and that Winter feels like he meets this devil, but it's a personal thing.

[00:56:36.220] - Bayley

That's such an interesting detail. I definitely did not pick up on that.

[00:56:41.550] - Emma

Yeah, it's definitely like we have this Faustian, and we don't get that many devils in romance. But I was like, Oh, Faustian opposed to something else. So I was like, Wait, well, we don't... It's not like we get the other type of devil, but it's this Faustian deal. But then Arden, it's like a Faustian deal. Normally, you sell your soul to the devil and then you benefit in some grand way. You get some knowledge or you get some riches. But Freddie's Faustian deal is that he doesn't have to go back to war, and it's like he's trading one hell for another. The reveal of a Faustian bargain is that you've traded one hell for another because you're not actually that happy in life because you've sold your soul, and then you have hell consequences to pay. That's the reveal. But it's like, Freddie starts with that. He's like, he's already been in hell. He will continue to be in hell. It's like, at least it's not out there. And Faland even says, like, that mine's better than out there. It's like, at least I'm not sending him to die when he's talking to Laura. This devil creature is interesting.

[00:57:35.330] - Emma

I think this is maybe where Arden connects herself the most to other literature. Things like we have, the Faustian devil and like, Mephistopheles Then I think the name comes from... The name is most similar to the devil figure in the Master and the Margarita, who's named Woland, I think. It's pretty similar. I think that's also a war war I Soviet fallout thing. World War I as Soviets or not different. It's Soviet-era literature dealing with the fallout of the early 20th century. I think she's referencing that. But he owns a hotel, he plays the fiddle. These are all devil characteristics. I was thinking the devil at the crossroads. Another connection is on Laura's side, the When she's with Jones, and Jones has that patient who tried to kill himself. Jones is not trying to save him because he knows that if the patient gets saved, he will just go to the firing squad because he was self-inflicted injury. The hotels are at crossroads, inns are at crossroads, and so that's where we find Fallend. But the reason that devils are at crossroads is because that's where suicide victims are buried, because they can't be buried in churches, and so you have to have a place for them.

[00:58:40.810] - Emma

Those cemeteries are often at crossroads outside of town. That's one of the origins of devils at the crossroads. That's another parallel we see between the hell that Laura is experiencing. There's empathy for a suicide or someone who has not yet committed suicide, but has self-inflicted injuries. What Freddie is going through It's like, and I think it just shows, again, the level of research that Arden is putting into both places, both story lines.

[00:59:06.780] - Bayley

Yeah, that's great. I'm sometimes skeptical when reading speculative fiction that turns disabilities magical, which is one way to interpret what is happening to Freddie and the other soldiers that Fallend takes, making PTSD and memory loss into payment to the devil. But I think it worked for me well in this case. And maybe I should think about if I actually think it's bad or if I just have been reading speculative fiction that handles it poorly?

[00:59:33.630] - Beth

No, I think, didn't you mention this? I think it works because there's other mentions of PTSD. It's not like this is the only instance is you making a deal with the devil. They talk about shell shock and it's so prevalent. It's not just this one-off instance.

[00:59:49.460] - Bayley

Yeah, totally. It being set largely in a war hospital does make it... So the only instance isn't Freddie.

[00:59:57.130] - Emma

I like the way that the soldiers talked about Falland, where it's like for so long in the book, you're like, is this just the story the soldiers tell each other about what happens to someone who gets shell shocked? It's like, oh, you've met the man at the crossroads. This is a way that we speak to each other. And sorry to bring up goodreads reviews again, but I did read a lot of them because I was interested to see what people who read more fantasy think about this book because I just felt like I was going in blind. But I saw some people say that they wish that this had all been in Freddie's head, that the reveal had been this is an entirely internal experience. And I was like, I hate that idea.

[01:00:29.170] - Bayley

Because it's bad.

[01:00:30.540] - Emma

It's so literal in a way that's like... It felt like a TV episode where it's all been a dream. I think it's important for Arden that it's both things, that Freddie is susceptible to this and is experiencing this the way that he's experienced it because of PTSD. Maybe Falland doesn't appear to him unless he has the PTSD.

[01:00:51.540] - Emma

But that doesn't mean he's not actually a magical creature either. It's both things at once. So I talked earlier about how I feel this is a very magic realism. And magic realism, generally in the genre, and I think this is true. I guess I was like, oh, it's true, and not in fantasy, but it's fantasy because they could create a setting. But magic realism, generally, I'm trying to think of a counter-example, generally is set in our world just with magical elements. But where you set magical realism, historically, it's often in places of fissures. That's one reason why I think World War One works so well, because it's this in betweenness and speculation of what world are we in in this moment? So famous examples are One Hundred Days of Solitude by García, Gabriel García-Marquez, where you have these layers of colonial intervention in Colombia. There's all this fissured identity of the native people of Colombia and then one generation of colonizers who are then colonized by the American Banana Company. Then Flannery O'Connor's work, where you have first slavery and then reconstruction, subjugating communities in the South. Again, a devil in the crossroads is a huge symbol in a lot of Southern literature.

[01:01:59.660] - Emma

It makes sense of War I in France and Belgium would be where this in between reality and fantasy story would work together. But it has to be part of the whole world, not just in someone's head. If it's just in someone's head, it loses that connection to the setting because then that could happen to anyone who's traumatized. It's like this fallen can only happen at World War One. It's important that this character, this manifestation of the devil, only exists in this setting in War War One because there's something special about this setting. The world falling apart is what allows the magic magic to exist. Even if the magic is sinister, that's how it works. And so when you separate it, it just was like, I don't think you got the point of the story if you wanted to be totally in his head. Also, how would you explain? I mean, I guess they're like, Oh, it should have been in his head. Laura shouldn't have ever seen Falland. And It's like, what? She's also traumatized. It's like they're in part and parcel.

[01:02:49.960] - Beth

Yeah, I really like that point. As my most common thing, I say after Emma's point.

[01:02:55.300] - Bayley

Like, Oh, wow, you're so smart. Thank you.

[01:02:58.430] - Emma

Blushing.

[01:02:58.660] - Beth

I like that because Because when you think of the reality of World War One, can you imagine if that was your reality? I feel like every thought I'd have would be like, Is this real? Do you know what I mean? So I agree with Emma. I think it's the perfect place to have a devil character, and you're questioning what is real and what is not. Moving on, I wanted to reference that interview I talked about before from Katie Fraser. She says, The veil between life and death is thin in Arden's novel. Through Freddie, we see the hellish life of a soldier and Faland's accursed labyrinth realm. And with Laura, we witnessed the hospital, itself a type of battleground, and the wasteland left by years of bombing. Importantly, the stark language Arden uses for Laura is a response to such hellscapes. And this is Arden speaking now. I read no memoir where someone expressed how they were feeling, and I think partially that was the culture, and partially it was trauma. You don't want to feel how you are feeling because that's opening a giant horrible can of worms. Getting Laura on the page was in part about how much emotion of hers to put down because she's not feeling her feelings either.

[01:04:12.630] - Beth

No one is. You can't be. People turn that off in these situations. I feel like this ties to what we were just talking about, but I think this is an interesting emotional place for a character to be in when they meet a potential romantic partner. I thought we should talk a little bit about Jones and Laura, and then the progression of their relationship. We could talk about Winter and Freddie here, too, if you have thoughts. I don't mean to just talk about them.

[01:04:40.390] - Bayley

Rewinding a little bit from Jones and Laura. I really was interested by Laura's early mentions of romance before we meet Jones that are her thinking that it seems immoral to fall for a wounded soldier. And she thinks- Right.

[01:04:54.320] - Beth

Yeah, it was so good. Because she's a nurse, and they're both in deeply emotional places. How do you know if what you're feeling is real.

[01:05:01.800] - Emma

I mean, it's a very traditional romance. I don't read these, but there are World War two category lines that do that. It's very common, like nurse and soldier.

[01:05:10.580] - Bayley

When I was looking through lists of World War One romance novel, proper romance novel, Yeah, a lot of them were either war nurses or gay men. That were like, those were the two representative categories.

[01:05:23.780] - Emma

The two genders, nurse and gay guy.

[01:05:26.540] - Beth

I almost said that.

[01:05:29.700] - Emma

And if you're non-binary, you're a gay nurse. There you go.

[01:05:35.480] - Bayley

But what Laura thinks exactly is like, when you're the only girl that he's seen for months and he's hurting worse than he's ever hurt in his life, it's a hot house emotion, like an orchid in a greenhouse. It can't survive the real world. I don't remember if this anecdote comes before she says that or after, but she talks about a fellow nurse who did just that. She pulled herself out of the workforce after she got married, and then she was widowed a couple of months after marriage. Like, the orchid was smashed. And then she meets Jones and is immediately so very annoyed by how poor his bedside manner is, which is a very charming, very romance detail.

[01:06:14.290] - Beth

Well, he's concerned about making you feel better immediately. He doesn't have time to put on the charm. No, he's busy. He's got stuff to do. He's got to make sure you're okay.

[01:06:23.530] - Bayley

And I really like that we go from that point in the story to the future where she's anticipating creating a life with him, and she really likes that. She thinks about him that she could not have stood sweetness or sentiment, but he had a surgeon's touch, gentle and a little ruthless, and the trust eased some of the knots in her soul. And I just I love that 180 on his appearance because they're both practical and gruff, which isn't to say that I think it lacks emotion. One of my favorite scenes was when Laura was telling Jones the full memory that is the memory that one of Falland would have wanted from her about the Halifax explosion and her shutdown and guilt about her mother dying. And she tells it with all the detail and emotion that like, Falland is extracting from his victims. But she does it willingly, and he returns this with his literal blood by giving Winter a transfusion for her because he is not convinced that he should do this. And fun side note, we have the same blood type, me and Jones. But I would not have discovered that this was a universal donor blood type because I pass out when people steal my blood.

[01:07:34.160] - Beth

I mean, that's not great.

[01:07:37.780] - Bayley

No. We do not have the constitution for war doctoring.

[01:07:39.970] - Emma

I don't think many of us do. Yeah. When I was reading this, I knew Bayley wouldn't pick a book that didn't have any romance for us. I was on the hunt for it because I know. If I'm reading genre fiction, I'm like, Who is it? I want to meet the guy. And then I was like, Well, maybe it's a lady, and maybe it's Pim. And then I was like, It's not Pim.

[01:08:00.090] - Bayley

I thought it was Pim for a while when I was first reading it as well. I thought it was Pim.

[01:08:02.540] - Emma

I was like, She's so beautiful. She's still at that description. I was like, we're really good. I don't care what she goes on.

[01:08:05.140] - Beth

I don't care what she is all the time. I was like, is this it?

[01:08:08.480] - Emma

Is it Pim?

[01:08:08.790] - Bayley

I was shocked when we meet Jones. I was like, It's a man?

[01:08:12.920] - Emma

Yeah. So every time we met a guy, it wasn't even just a guy. Anytime Laura met anybody, I was like, is this the person? And then the guy she meets who ends up giving her pneumonia and the flu. And I was like, I don't think it's him. And then I was like, Stop trying to read books this way, Emma. I was like, it will happen when it happens. There's a lot of other things going on. But once Jones showed up and there was a little cantankerous, and he met her at her level, I was like, I hope it's this one. I hope it's this one. So I was on board with Jones very quickly. And I think what I noticed is that I feel like Laura, very early on, you see that she's surrounded by people that she has to hedge with. I was thinking about this with the Parkeys where she lives with these people that she thinks as charlatans. We've decided that maybe we think of them as... They are magic in a way, but like...

[01:08:56.540] - Beth

I think they're the fates.

[01:08:57.190] - Beth

I could see three of them and just how they're introduced.

[01:08:59.700] - Emma

They're old ladies

[01:08:59.920] - Beth

They get this prophecy types of thing. Anyway, sorry. Keep going, Emma.

[01:09:04.660] - Emma

Right. But Laura thinks of them. She's like, They're scammers. They're these scammers that I have to hedge how I speak about their profession because they're being so kind to me after this trauma and the processing of her going through her brothers and things. She has to keep certain things from people around her, even with Pim and Mary. And again, I saw reviews of this that we're talking about, the way that the friendship worked in this. I think they wanted Pim, Laura, and Mary to be a girl gang of nurses. And I was like, that's not who these characters But again, she has to hedge with these characters, partially because she's trying to impress Mary as a nurse, but then she has to go against Mary's wishes. And then Pim, Pim is older than her. Pim has a son who has died.

[01:09:42.370] - Beth

I was confused. I think she said she's 10 years older than her, but her son is... I was like, How old is Pim? I was so confused by that.

[01:09:51.960] - Emma

I think she was 38, maybe? Yeah. She was a very young mother.

[01:09:55.470] - Beth

She had her kid when she was younger.

[01:09:57.420] - Bayley

She was right out the gate.

[01:09:59.490] - Beth

Yeah.

[01:10:00.060] - Emma

But Laura has to have this maternal role with Pim because Pim is so... What we were talking about earlier where I was like, I can't believe Laura is not falling apart all the time. We realized that by the end of the book that Pim has been falling apart this whole time. And it's like, Laura... I think Laura has clocked this and is very maternal towards Pim, but it's like, that's not their dynamic. That shouldn't be their dynamic. When Jones clocks her as he can be more gruff with her and he's like, I'm going to tell you when to rest, but I'm also going to tell you when you're going to work. We have this mission, we have this task. It was like, oh, this is the The first person we've met that I feel like Laura can be her whole self with. Again, I feel like another complaint that I saw people have is that they felt like Laura was surface level. I don't think that's true. I think Laura is surface level with people. I don't think she's a surface level character. I don't think Arden is giving a surface level Laura. I think Laura is giving surface level Laura to other people.

[01:10:49.830] - Emma

I don't know if we get her a super in-depth relationship with her and Jones because there are other things going on. But I think it's pretty clear there's a potential for them to be partners in a way that does not exist with other characters.

[01:11:01.000] - Beth

Yeah, what you said about how people perceived her as being surface reminded me of... I don't know if this is in EM Forster's aspects of the novel book where he talks about flat and dynamic characters.

[01:11:13.700] - Emma

Yeah, that's for there.

[01:11:14.380] - Beth

I know he does that. He talks about that. I don't know if this idea is from him, though, but I think it is. But we have flat characters in our life, and we are flat characters to other people. Do you know your doctor that well? Do you know just the people you see, and you just have that very surface-level interaction? I see Laura having those surface interactions with people around her, but I feel like I know her. She's my friend. Right. I I'm reading this book. I spent that much time with her. And she strikes me as the person who needs to be doing something or else she will be falling apart. So I think that's why Jones is so good for her, like you said, where he's able to be like, Rest and now do something.

[01:11:59.940] - Emma

Yeah. I think a lot of the critiques I saw of Laura were the same stuff we see in romance when people are harder around the heroine, and she's not very sweet. She's not very sweet. I think this, again, reading reviews of people who are not romance readers, I think a lot of the stuff they said, I was like, If you said this in a romance review, I'd be able to clock it as a dog whistle of your bad romance takes. It's like when someone is like, Oh, they're not sweet or not sympathetic, is the way they say it. Laura is not very sympathetic. I was like, How can you say that she's not sympathetic? She's just cantankerous. But Also, very few characters have earned their bitterness more.

[01:12:37.410] - Bayley

Everyone has died. She is injured. She probably can't do her job for... She's only got five more years of hands, according to the doctor.

[01:12:47.290] - Beth

As we've been speaking about Laura and Jones, I again wanted to expand to Winter and Freddie. So when I spoke with Bayley, she did express some annoyances at certain reviews that talked about the inclusion of these romances. I have an example I'll read here Here, "The two romance tracks in the book stay quite low key, which I appreciate as they don't overpower the core narrative of Laura's Search for Her Brother. However, I'm not convinced that the romance tracks were needed in the first place. One felt included only for the sake of inclusion, and the other felt it was shoved in because a platonic relationship might dissatisfy readers. And in parentheses, so correct." As with many Goodreads reviews, I have to remind myself that these are people's feelings, and they're just expressing them. But I guess I wonder why this the viewer feels this way. To be fair, I don't know if this is the usual beats, but I don't know. Freddie and Winter literally meet on a battlefield and on our opposing sides. There isn't a scene of gently holding hands, but there's a scene where Freddie kills a fellow Canadian soldier to protect Winter.

[01:13:48.970] - Beth

I don't know what you want for me.

[01:13:51.700] - Bayley

How else do you interpret that?

[01:13:53.640] - Beth

I know. He was like, I can't believe I did that. I'm like...

[01:13:56.500] - Bayley

I can?

[01:13:57.240] - Beth

Yeah. How do we feel about this?

[01:14:00.810] - Bayley

I do agree that it's not like the usual romance beats, but with Jones and Laura, they have the like, when he tells her his name is Steven, I was like, that is a good moment.

[01:14:12.390] - Beth

Yeah, that's right.

[01:14:13.150] - Bayley

But aside from that...

[01:14:15.070] - Emma

He's like, I don't know when to say this, but you can call me Steven. Yeah.

[01:14:18.660] - Bayley

I was like, Oh, my God, he has a name that did not occur to me. But yeah, I don't want to sound like I'm saying that other people can't think differently than I do about this book. I'm not a terrible person. But I do think that this book would not work, at least not without major thematic overhaul, without the romances. Obviously, the sibling relationship is more narratively load-bearing or whatever, but not by a lot. And I did go into this book knowing very little about what was going on. I just knew it was like a World War One historical fantasy. And I think I knew Haley liked it, and that was all I knew. But as soon as they're in the shell hole together, I'm like, wow, it's going to cause you a lot of problems to fall in love in a, I guess it's not a shell hole, in an overturned pill box. Which one of the historical details that I was very confused by is I did not know what a pill box was. I don't know how I didn't know, but I had to Google it eight times because I kept forgetting.

[01:15:16.860] - Emma

I also googled it because I didn't...

[01:15:19.420] - Beth

It's just a concrete box. Yeah.

[01:15:23.240] - Bayley

But I feel like that one maybe could have used a little bit more explanation.

[01:15:28.100] - Beth

This is true.

[01:15:29.980] - Emma

Yeah, that one, maybe there could have been in text. Because at pill box, I was thinking like, is it a type of trench? Is it like a... Yeah. What has collapsed? It was... Yeah. But the people who were talking about the romance negatively in this book, I wondered if they were romance readers. So I checked the person who wrote this review that Beth quoted. The only books that we have in common are Bridgerton. So I don't feel like they're at least a historical reader. I didn't police their entire goodreads. I just checked. I was like, Are they a historical romance reader? And so I think Arden is using much He's using romance conventions much earlier than I think some of the other reviews suggest. They're like, This came out of nowhere. I just don't think he read romance. I think the scene with the soldier, where he kills the Canadian soldier for Winter, it's like, Oh, that's a big romantic gesture in the context of this. I read it that way. The same thing when Jones showed up, I immediately was like, Oh, that's the guy that is going to be the Laura's romantic lead.

[01:16:23.480] - Emma

I could clock him really quickly because I know what a romantic lead introduction looks like, which I think just speaks to different genre conventions. If you're looking for the mystery and fantasy, the romance may seem like it pops out of nowhere, but I don't think that's the case because there are these displaced beats in genre fiction. But also, I think this may be a reference that people miss when reading it. I don't know that much about World War II under the battle politics umbrella, but I do know a lot about Wilfred Owen, who is a poet in World War I, who is definitely Freddie's namesake, so his name Wilfred Ivan. It's close enough that it's definitely a Wilfred Owen reference. They also have similar personalities, this anxiety about his quality of poetry. If anyone has a vague sense of World War I being the gayest war, Wilfred Owen is a part of that. He was an English poet who didn't frame his poems around patriotism, but more about the realities of war, so like gassings and trench warfare. He wrote about how hard it was to be on the front. He had been diagnosed with shell shock and was recuperating when he met poet Siegfried Sassoon, who is not German, but has a German name.

[01:17:24.920] - Emma

His last name is actually Jewish, and so doesn't read his English, but he was English. Then his mother loved Wagney, so he's named Siegfried, which did not bode well for him when World War I started. But he's not German, but he has a German name. Sassoon had been also diagnosed with shell shock, but really because the army wanted to avoid court-martialing him. He had become a conscientious objector after being a war hero. The army was like, We can't court martial Sasoon. That would be terrible publicity for us. Sassoon was like, Please court martial me. That will be terrible publicity for you. So he refused to return to the front after being lauded, and he won the military cross. There are more connections here. So Sassoon had written a statement called a Solder's Declaration that happens the same day, that's published in the London Times the same day as the Battle of Passjindale. How do you say that? Passchendaele. Passchendaele . That's where Pim's son dies in the book, which outlines his conscientious objections. So he had hoped for the court martial. So they meet in the hospital when they're both... When Owen is actually shell shocked and Sassoon is being punished there.

[01:18:27.310] - Emma

So while recovering, they begin this artistic and then possibly romantic relationship. It's definitely romantic. We're not unsure if it's physical because there's not evidence of their writings, but also they were in the hospital the whole time together. But there were definitely love letters. Then they recuperate, and Sassoon encourages Owen to write these poems and continue his work. Owen really admires Sassoon's writings, which he's also a poet. But eventually, Sassoon feels guilty about leaving his men and returns to the front, though he's injured again in 1918 in a friendly fire incident and sent back to England. So Owen, though he could have remained in the hospital because of his earnest diagnosis for the rest of the war, he felt like they had this relationship and that one of them should be on the front gathering data and gathering information and writing these poems about warfare. So he volunteers to go back, even though he's been shell-shocked. And he also volunteers for harder and harder tasks in admiration for Sassoon, even though Sassoon threatened to stab Owen in the leg if he went back to war. But while Siegfried goes back to England, Owen goes back to France without telling him and writes him from the front lines.

[01:19:29.920] - Emma

Because it's like, I'm back. And Siegfried is very upset. And then Owen is killed in a battle just the week before Armistice Day. And so his mother gets the telegram about his death on Armistice Day. She hears the bells ringing and gets the telegram, and it's this very tragic scene. And then Sassoon helps his poems reach a wider audience. So I think if you can clock the Wilfred Owen reference in his name, I think, again, or maybe a little bit more primed for the romance. And I just wanted to read one of the love letters that Owen wrote Sassoon because I think it's very romantic. He said, You will know what you're doing. You have fixed my life however short. You do not light me. I was always a mad comet, but you have fixed me. I spun round you a satellite for a month, and I shall swing out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will blaze.

[01:20:10.980] - Emma

And it's like, Oh my God.

[01:20:12.510] - Bayley

That is Oh my God.

[01:20:15.290] - Emma

It's just this feral poetry collaboration. And I mean, Sassoon lives to be an old man and never really recovers from Owen's death. He has a lot of affairs with other interwar gay celebrities, even Ivor Norvello, he becomes a dilentante after this, and he just never really recovers from Owen's death. It always is this trauma. There's a great movie, a World War I movie called Benediction by Terence Davies that I highly recommend about Siegfried Sassoon that is just phenomenal. Actually, they're two World War One movies by Terence Davies, I think. I think Sunset Song is also a World War One movie that's also great, or that may be World War Two. But Terence Davies' War movies are sad and phenomenal.

[01:20:59.890] - Bayley

I will take your recommendations. The only thing that I knew about Owen before that little thing that you told me was the fact about his death. So I'm just so interested in that sound.

[01:21:11.830] - Emma

They both have Monuments in Poets' Corner for the World War I poets in Westminster Abbey. They threw there 16 World War I poets. Then it's just... It's like, he's very... So Sass oonreally makes his legacy because he published... He'd written a poem a little bit before they met, and then he just has It's this explosion of work after they meet in their collaboration.

[01:21:34.580] - Bayley

And back to people not understanding that Freddie and Winter are going to be a romantic item. I do not understand how you read things like Winter refusing to go back to the German line and saying, No, I am still your prisoner, Ivan. And then Freddie responding that he won't let Winter die in thinking, It was a vow that he'd written in another man's blood, and now it was all he had left in the world. And then earlier- Excuse me, the romance.

[01:22:01.250] - Beth

Yeah.

[01:22:01.890] - Bayley

Like, what do you mean? A vow that I've written in another man's blood?

[01:22:05.000] - Emma

You could pluck that out and put that in a medieval romance, and it would just fit immediately. Yeah.

[01:22:10.170] - Bayley

And then even earlier than that, Freddie says, or Freddie thinks, Freddie knew that if Winter died, he'd go mad, and he wouldn't have enough sanity left to kill himself. And even if Oh my God. Some miraculous hand of God came down and freed him, it wouldn't matter because his mind would never get out of the pill box? Like, that I don't know. Do you think that about your buddy?

[01:22:33.100] - Beth

Right. Just your platonic friend.

[01:22:35.110] - Bayley

And I don't know, maybe you do. Maybe in isolation, you could think that these quotes are not indicative of something romantic, but the intensity of emotion and the constant choice to stay together despite it clearly being the better choice that once they find out which side is who's to separate. That's probably better. Maybe? I guess Winter is very injured, so maybe you make an argument that that's not better, but it was an option that they do not consider. And then they recite poetry to each other. And when Winter is wounded, he is literally hunting the streets in enemy territory to try to find Freddie again? I'm so confused how you could make it either all the way to the scene where they're in bed together in the dark or to the scene where Laura is clearly jealous that she has saved Freddy for Winter before you realize it's romantic. Like, this is It's clearly romantic on page three or whatever.

[01:23:33.360] - Emma

I think the moment that I clocked it for real was when he's like... I mean, I guess earlier, but the part that I find so romantic is the way he tells him the poem. He reads him the poem, he's like, I promise my paintings are better. It's so charming. He's like, You need to impress him so much.

[01:23:48.740] - Bayley

And he keeps thinking about how young he must seem. And he's like, no, I'm serious. It's so- Right.

[01:23:56.300] - Beth

Yeah. He wants to be grown up for him because Winter is 35. He lived in England before, and that's... I mentioned this in the plot summary, that that's where you learn English and stuff. And Freddie is only 21. So yeah, it strikes very much as like, no, I'm a viable romantic partner. I'm a man. Yeah, it's so funny.

[01:24:16.970] - Emma

And the story- He's like, You must be my age. And he's like, I'm 35.

[01:24:19.470] - Bayley

The story Winter tells about Allied soldiers screaming "boy" at German soldiers and them standing up is a real thing that you find in non-fiction accounts is them screaming waiter, essentially, and seeing who turns and then shooting that person. Oh, wow. Which, yeah, interesting historical integration.

[01:24:44.890] - Beth

As an astute reader might guess from the title, Hands are a Theme in this book. There's direct reference to ghosts having warm hands in the book. Laura herself has injured hands. Pim asks Laura at the beginning of the book, What What happened? Laura's first response is glib. I shook hands with a fine gentleman in a top hat. A mistake, they told me later, he was Lord Beelzebub. You really meet all kinds of people at parties abroad. And then about 40 pages later, Laura and Pim talk about Laura's reasons for wanting to go to Belgium. Pim asserts that she must have a small hope, Freddie is alive or else she wouldn't go. Laura says she's being romantic, and she also wants to dissuade Pim from accompanying her, so she relates the real reason, unprompted of what happened to her hands. It happened over time, said Laura. The scarring, the words would barely come. Speaking of the war, conjured it as crisply as life. The smells, the sound of the rain, cold nights, long days, flies, the screaming, she forged ahead. You'll see the worst wounds in the world over there, wounds that shock you, that a man could be so hurt and not dead.

[01:26:00.170] - Beth

You'll have your bare hands all over those wounds as they go bad, and they will go bad. It's all farmland, the battlefields. They've been spreading manure since the Middle Ages. If you have so much as a paper cut or a blister on your own hand, Well, that goes bad, too. Over and over, it hurts very much. It scars. Do you think you want your hands to look like this? Laura then realizes she shouldn't judge if someone else wants to grieve. Pim has lost her son, as we mentioned. I see Laura's hands as external manifestations of her inner trauma in a way. Sure, there are big things she went through, but she got a thousand cuts every day attending Wounded Soldiers. And then when she first meets Jones, there's this exchange. So I think this speaks to how she wants others to perceive her hands, or that she is maybe a little self-conscious. Pleased to meet you, said Laura. I've just got a touch of Pneumonia, yes, I have yours. It sounds like you're trying to breathe underwater, said Jones. Not particularly all right, if you ask me. His eyes had fallen on her hands. I know it's not a very overt line, but I'm always speaking to the power of a look.

[01:27:19.370] - Beth

I feel like where someone is looking, you could complain like, Hey, you gave me a weird look earlier. Do you know what I mean? The fact that she clocks that he notices it, I think is very telling.

[01:27:29.470] - Bayley

Yeah, and shows you how hyper-aware she is of her hands. I was so into the way that Laura's hands were discussed throughout the story, and I really thought of them as how she thinks of her own self-worth, particularly in relation to her femininity and romantic desirability. I really liked the scene where she's trying to scare him out of going to Belgium by brandishing the ugliness at someone who she repeatedly mentions is incredibly We already discussed this a little bit earlier, but in my first read, I thought that this was a romantic situation or maybe a one-sided romantic situation. But this reading, it really felt more like Laura was seeing the old world ideal femininity in Pim, which obviously is a part of her deeply misunderstanding what is going on with Pim. And there's a scene later where Pim wants to cut Laura's hair in an attempt to get Laura to care about looking pretty. And she tells Laura she is pretty and then says, A good man won't care about your hands or your leg. And Laura is very hurt by this and replies like, So very earnest, but will he care about my hair?

[01:28:45.050] - Bayley

Which deflates Pim because she is not in an emotional place to have people be mean to her. Which leads to Laura letting Pim cut her hair. And then she reflects on romance and vanity in that scene and stops thinking about her physical appearance negatively, for the duration of the scene, obviously. Things go back to her being very worried about her hands. And the romantic aspect of Laura thinking about her hands, there is a passage where Laura is letting Jones do something to her hands, I think massage them maybe. And after she has started to develop fondness for him, and she thinks that she would have preferred him to see her naked than to have him closely look at her hands again. And then there's the passage I referenced earlier, where the pair are discussing a future postwar, and it begins with him asking to hold her hands. And I just thought it was so cute. She gives him one hand only. She's like, I'm half here, which I thought was funny.

[01:29:47.130] - Emma

I guess what I was reading at, maybe I should have been tracking the hands more, but the thing that I kept thinking about with her hands, and maybe because this other image comes up so often, is I guess I was really... I found the way that they described her mother's death very harrowing. Something with the glass being blasted in and that's what kills her. And she finds her mother-

[01:30:06.470] - Bayley

That's horrifying.

[01:30:08.710] - Emma

Her mother still alive when she finds her? And it's having trouble crying and she doesn't have eyes anymore. But I think about your reaction when something is flying at you. You throw your hands up, and that's often an injury when glass explodes is that you have glass in your hands and it can cause all this scarring. So I was thinking about this connection with her mother that Laura's hands look like her mother's hands would have looked. It's like she has this spirit or this ghost figure who she identifies as her mother that she keeps seeing over and over again. Even Laura's scars start in another place, when she finds her mother's body, Laura does return to the Parkey's house with glass in her hands because she's been picking out glass and holding her mother's body.

[01:30:50.490] - Emma

That's another way that her hands get scarred, even though her hands were scarred before that. Again, her hands have this mark of this terrible, terrible thing she witnessed. It's like that's that could have been the punctuation on her life, the last terrible thing she saw, but then she returns to Europe to see the other things and to find Freddie. But I think I really liked Laura's relationship to her mother in the flashbacks, or not even flashbacks to the memories, we see Laura dismissing her mother's spirituality and her mother is this anxious woman who thinks the Apocalypse is coming, and Laura is like, no, that's not... When the Haley's Comet, when they describe Haley's Comet, Laura is coming home from school telling her mother about the stuff from school about what she learned about what Haley's Comet is. Her mother's like, no, it's the white horse of the Apocalypse. But I think Laura is not... She's dismissive of her mother's more spiritual feelings, but she also loves her mother. I'd like when there are depictions of those relationships that are not so, so, so saccharine, especially when a parent is lost. But there's complications. Laura both disagreed with her mother and her father about things.

[01:31:57.150] - Emma

Her father was furious at her for going to school to be a nurse, but she still feels a loss acutely. I like that physical connection that happens with Laura and her hands and what her mother's hands would have looked like, and also another scarring event for her hands.

[01:32:13.650] - Beth

Yeah, I really like that. We want to tie this together with a quote near the end of the book where Laura has saved Freddie from Falland and they're out, and she's lost. She doesn't know where to go. She's thinking about how she doesn't believe in ghosts, and she thinks of all the people who have talked about ghosts in her life. Winter had said, You ask the ghosts. Obviously, a big theme in this book is everyone in life has ghosts. If you've known someone who's died, I feel like their ghost follows you. And speaking to what Emma was saying about the complicated relationship of your relationships. It's not when someone dies, maybe you had something bad that was happening between you, and that will never be resolved. But there's a lot of good as well. And so there's this quote at the end. I'm not a book cryer, but I think this may have been close. So like we mentioned, Laura doesn't really believe this, but she just thinks, I'm going to try this anyway. So from the book, Laura whispered like the child she had not been in ever so long. Mama, I'm lost. Can you hear me?

[01:33:29.620] - Beth

We're lost Freddie and I. Silence. A hand brushed hers, warm fingers, a little rough with glass. Ghosts have warm hands. She didn't open her eyes. She didn't dare. Looking would burst her fragile soap bubble of belief. She didn't look even when that familiar hand wound its fingers with hers and pulled her forward. Holding onto Freddie, she walked. And then, some unnumbered steps later, the hand let go. Laura opened her eyes and saw that she and Freddie were behind the chateau of Kutov, seen only hazily through the mist of her tears. I don't know. The ghost thing to me and the hands. I feel like Arden has all these nebulous concepts, and I feel like you can put them together in multiple ways, which I think is with this discussion point. You can read the hands multiple ways. And that's the best thing I like about books, is there is not a single perfect reading, you can get multiple meanings from one thing. So that's what I saw with the hands.

[01:34:38.390] - Bayley

Yeah. When I was looking for hand quotes to talk about the hands, I searched in the e-book, and there are 259 times that the word hand comes up. So yeah, it's definitely a fertile ground. And I very much am a book crier, and I almost cried while you were reading that quote.

[01:34:55.360] - Beth

I'm so easy to make cry. I was trying not to. I was like, Hold it together.

[01:34:58.500] - Bayley

I think I cried five times while reading this book, but I was trying to be brave about it.

[01:35:05.790] - Beth

It was just like such a vulnerable moment for her. And you're lost with your brother. You're desperately missing your mom. How could you not cry out? Anyway, we should end the podcast. We'll just end on that note. Not the podcast in general, this episode. Do we have any final thoughts that we wanted to talk about before we close out?

[01:35:31.000] - Emma

I'm excited. I don't know when it will happen for me because I have such a long TBR, but I would definitely read Arden. Again, I'm excited for that trilogy that you all both have read, right?

[01:35:39.290] - Bayley

Yeah, I've read the first one. I'm curious what you think about it. But I'm going to finish it.

[01:35:41.680] - Emma

It's set in Russia? Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, it just seemed really interesting. So I was like, I would come back to her, which is a big endorsement for me because, again, this is my first foray in a long time. Since I DNF'D ACOTAR, I think this is the first time I've read something that would class as a fantasy.

[01:35:57.270] - Bayley

That is so funny.

[01:35:59.110] - Emma

I'm willing to try things. I'm not to add more. I need to try things. People endorse them. I won't go in rogue. But yeah, I really enjoyed this. And I like the... I don't know if I want more World War I romances. I wish people would try it more. I don't know. I don't know how you would do it. I want someone who is smart and interested in this history to figure out what are the conventions of a World War I romance? How do you write that? I think people should try. We're getting more and more distance from it. It would be so different. I think people should try it. But maybe we have to find that in other genres still.

[01:36:33.770] - Bayley

My request for a World War I romance is that there is this thing that apparently British women would do where they would pin feathers to men that they saw not doing war. And then, as a way to call them a coward. And I feel like you could do something with that being the beginning of a romance novel. You sent somebody off to war with your feather. Oh, you shamed them? Yeah. Yeah. And then having to deal with your own culpability.

[01:37:03.130] - Emma

Bayley, I feel like you have to write this.

[01:37:05.130] - Bayley

I will. The problem is I can't write dialogue

[01:37:08.570] - Emma

Some omance writers can't write dialogue. Sorry.

[01:37:11.690] - Bayley

I'll join their ranks.

[01:37:12.820] - Emma

It hasn't stopped some people.

[01:37:16.330] - Bayley

And also, Emma, not to add to your TBR, but if you liked this, you might like Uprooted or Spinning Silver. Is that by the name?

[01:37:25.940] - Emma

Naomi Novik. Okay. Yeah.

[01:37:27.720] - Beth

Naomi Novik.

[01:37:29.200] - Bayley

They're very similar. Those ones are more romance-y than this one. Not by a lot, but, you know. A little bit.

[01:37:37.470] - Beth

Well, Bayley, thank you for coming and joining us.

[01:37:41.670] - Bayley

Thank you for having me. It's very fun to not just be saying my thoughts out loud in my car while you all are talking to each other. Like, you all are responding to me. How exciting.

[01:37:51.830] - Beth

I know, right? I am hopeful this will be at least a yearly thing. So expect Bayley more in the future. If she wants to, I want to... I would love to come back. You all are fine. Please come back. And you can find her, like I said, on most platforms at Bayley readsbooks. And that's B-A-Y-L-E-Y. So thank you so much for listening to Reformed Rakes. If you'd like bonus content, you can subscribe to our Patreon at patreon. Com/reformedrakes. You can follow us on Twitter, Blue Sky, and Instagram for show updates. The username for those platforms is at reformedrakes, or you can email us at reformedrakes@gmail.com. We love to hear from you. And then if you could rate and review us on Apple and Spotify, it does help a lot. Thank you again, and we will see you next time.