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What an achievement.

I followed Katherine Arden joyfully and with absolute trust from page one through the Winter Night Trilogy. I journeyed, a non-horror reader, with trepidation through the Small Spaces Quartet. Since her first novel, I have been prepared to follow where Ms. Arden would lead, to read what she would write.

I was not prepared for this. It took me a while to read; it is so stressful and heartbreaking and horrifying in its reality that I could often only read a few pages at a time and would step away on their verge of a panic attack. It is so terrifying, and yet also so hopeful and genuine and necessary. It makes me feel like healing is possible. And that is truly a gift.

An absolutely stellar accomplishment.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

What would the Devil do in a hell created by humans? That is the question at the heart of this story, which starts out with extreme gruesomeness based in the horrors of WWI, and gradually shows a more tender side. War certainly shows the worst in human beings, but also brings out the best: their capacity for self-sacrificing love. The Devil wants to rob us of the emotions that both bring us pain and teach us of our indelible spiritual connections; he offers us oblivion to soothe the first, but in so doing breaks the second. With her images and events based in the experiences of war, Arden brings the situation to life and makes us how we would choose.

I adored Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy and was looking forward to this the moment it was announced. Her newest books is entirely different, but it a way that made me truly awed by the range she has as a writer. A brutal yet poetic brooding on the unique cruelty of WWI and its place in time, a beautiful yet heartbreaking example of two siblings with no one else left... I have rarely read something that so grimly depicts the violence and aftermath of a battlefront yet leaves room for glimmers of hope to grow. The speculative element is light though grows in importance and plays with the idea of reality in a way I really liked and felt fit the circumstances. Highly recommend.

[Note: I was provided a review copy of this book by the publisher.]

The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a standalone historical fiction novel with a touch of literary fantasy-horror.

The story centers on two perspectives told in separate WWI-era timelines: the post-Halifax Explosion life of Laura Iven, a wounded field nurse who receives word that her brother Freddie has been killed in combat and decides to go back to Europe when something isn't adding up about her brother's death; and the in-the-trenches experience of Freddie, her brother, a soldier who escapes a near-death experience alongside a German soldier named Hans and then finds himself taking refuge with a mysterious man often known by soldiers as the "fiddler."

As the earlier-timeline Freddie finds himself more ingrained with this mysterious man, the future Laura treks back to Europe and tries to uncover the mystery of her brother's death, which is intertwined with the constant rumors of the charismatic hotelier whose music and evenings are said to make the horrors of war disappear for those who indulge in them.

Arden has crafted a story that, at times, made me want to gnaw my own arm off--if you'll forgive the dramatic expression. Although the prose is more sparse than the writing found in Arden's fantasy The Winternight Trilogy series, it often cuts deep and hard and unforgiving. Parts of this novel made me wring my hands, get up and walk around to shake something off me, or sit up ramrod straight in bed.

Moving explorations of the futility of war, the way it destroys and reimagines people, the desperate situations it creates are beautifully woven into the story. Perhaps most moving of all is the blatant admittance that even those who survive war do not survive as themselves; they do not come out, in the end, as the same person.

Although Laura's story does offer an intriguing perspective and adds to the mystery, I do think that the book would have been better served by cutting the chapters from Laura's perspective and focusing on Freddie, Hans, and other supplementary characters instead. This would have allowed the relationship between these characters to develop more organically and fully than they ended up doing.

Laura's side of the story felt far too slow and static, and while I did appreciate the metaphorical points Arden made with Laura towards the end of the book, they could have easily been made without requiring readers to follow Laura's perspective for half the chapters.

The epilogue of the novel also feels far too rushed and the events and character developments seem too sudden and shoehorned-in. They needed more time to develop; perhaps throughout an entirely new "part" of the novel rather than a short epilogue.

Overall, though, I recommend this novel for fan's of Arden's previous works. Readers who are familiar with the Small Spaces Quartet may enjoy the "fiddler" character treading similar (and far darker, in many ways) ground in a novel aimed at adult readers. Readers who enjoyed Arden's The Winternight Trilogy will be in for a story far different from Arden's previous foray into fantasy, but I think that anyone who has appreciated Arden's writing will get something from this book.

It may not be perfect, but there's something special in these pages; something that, like the events in the story, leaves you changed. Even if it's only just a little.

Arden has jested on social media that she feels like she sold her soul to write this novel, and there may be something to that notion.

This was beautifully written and I wasn’t surprised as the author’s previous books have been similar. It took me a little while to really get engrossed in this book but it will stay with me for awhile as will the characters. The author does and excellent job of really transporting you back in time. I really enjoyed this, it was moving and poignant.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts is my first Katherine Arden novel, and I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would! I’m giving this a 3.5/5 rating. I felt like it was a bit slow to start, but I’m glad that I pushed through- I started to get pretty invested by the 70% mark, and by the end, I was pretty attached to these characters. This story definitely had some traumatizing themes (as most books about war tend to), but the characterization was really well-rounded by the end. Chapter 43 in particular absolutely killed me (in a good way!) and I will be thinking about the ending for quite some time. I really look forward to reading Arden’s other books, and I’m very grateful to have gotten to read this as an ARC!

As someone who absolutely loves The Winternight Trilogy, I went into The Warm Hands of Ghosts with very high expectations but the story fell very flat for me.

The writing style was stilted and I found it difficult to connect with Laura. I liked Freddie’s POV and wish Laura was completely cut out because I never found myself invested in her as a character. 

It’s obvious that Katherine Arden researched a lot about the setting but unfortunately the characters and plot just didn’t do it for me.

Katherine Arden isn’t capable of writing bad prose, and I certainly wouldn’t call this a bad book, but it is a bit of a mess. Unfortunately, the characters never came alive and the plot never came together for me.

I kept hoping to find myself absorbed in the story but it never happened. At first, I really liked that Laura, the heroine of this one, wasn’t the sort of plucky, fairytale heroine we got with Vasya in Arden’s Winternight trilogy. I adore Vasya, but I was also excited to get a darker, hardened, less likable lead.

But instead of a heroine made of edges, full of shadows and depth, we’re served up a character who is entirely flat. Laura is an emotional void. I don’t mind a heroine who has closed herself off from emotion, but I need to see that inside she does have some remnant of feelings and impulses and life.

Laura’s brother, our other protagonist, was a more interesting and dynamic voice. But he never became the wholly three-dimensional character I wanted either.

This book was missing what makes a story engrossing and immersive for me—drama. I want to see characters brought into conflict with each other; I want to see them forced to grow and change.

In a story as heavy and dark as this one, I truly expected I’d get some feeling of anxiety or angst for the characters, something to make me latch onto them and feel desperate to see their stories end well. In the novels I really enjoy, that desperation forces me to finish a book in a day or two. I just never got that here.

The amount of research that clearly went into this novel is wonderful. Rats in a pillbox. Wounded men in the trenches drowning in a few inches of rain. Titanic victims with their eyes picked out by seabirds. Arden absolutely hit the mark when it comes to setting a near-apocalyptic scene and transporting you to another time and place.

After she delivered not a single miss in the Winternight trilogy, who can knock Arden for finally having a bit of a miss with this one? I’ll still pick up her next book.

I will say that her writing in this seemed different to what I remember; particularly in the Laura chapters, it was very terse and direct. It was still good, just different from the flow and lyricism I expected.

Arden’s prose is very assured, with the specificity and precision in her metaphors that I love and think is missing in a lot of writing I come across these days. Her figurative language has context and meaning. When someone speaks “in a voice like a Lewis gun”—that’s not a phrase put there just to sound pretty.

I never thought I would be so okay with not loving a Katherine Arden book. I liked it just fine, and there were even parts that sparkled for me (particularly towards the ending) but it wasn't a favorite. And that's alright, because it wasn't a book that was written for me. I am not a historical fiction set during a war kind of person. That's not my vibe, even when undertaken by one of my favorite authors. But if that is your thing? If you want a book that seems gentle even when it's talking about horrific things, that feels like it has a honey-colored filter over the whole thing and moves slowly but deliberately and shows people falling in love without telling you that they're falling in love, with hints of the fantastical and people who make bargains with a mysterious figure with a fiddle, then yeah. This is the book for you. I'm glad that it's in the world, and I am so excited for the people who will find it and treasure it and get to experience a book that feels written for them.

A beautiful yet haunting story about the traumas of war. My favorite part of Katharine Arden books is the atmosphere that she creates. She has such a simple writing style, not overly flowery, and yet she still manages to invoke such a sense of place. I felt totally immersed while reading this book. The concept was interesting and like nothing I can recall ever reading. For the most part, the characters were also very memorable. You find yourself drawn to even the bad/evil characters. Her characters are also really believable. After having read the Winternight trilogy and this book and loving both, I will read anything Arden comes out with next!

A nurse, back home from the front lines of WWI, begins to suspect that her missing brother might be alive. But when she returns to find answers, a mysterious figure haunts her days. And when she discovers that this otherworldly being might know where her brother is, she vows to stop at nothing until she's knows the truth about her brother's last days.

Beautifully written and well-paced, Katherine Ardens newest novel is a tender but evocative look at the realities of war, told through the twin perspectives of a brother and sister. Alongside the harshness of conflict, the book peppers in the supernatural and makes a compelling case for how blind humanity can be to it's own destruction.

I was very intrigued by the cover of this book. It is truly beautiful. I did think it would be a vampire novel but I ended up being equally as intrigued by the description. Some of the reviews say the female protagonist is bland or unrelatable, but I actually really liked her. I don't even entirely disagree with those reviews but there's a difference between flat, terribly written characters, and characters who aren't naturally charismatic. She was a little unlikeable, but most real people are. I liked the realism in their characteristic and enjoyed the plot enough that that didn't even matter in the end.

During the Great War, a combat nurse searches for her brother, believed dead in the trenches despite eerie signs that suggest otherwise.

To start, I have never been so compelled by fantasy-laced historical fiction as I am when I read a Katherine Arden book. This story gutted me, and kept me wanting more.

There’s so much to talk about, but here’s what stood out to me:

You can watch, easily, how someone would start to lose their mind while being in this type of situation. It’s not simple to explain, and many have tried.

This book, I think, does it well because there is a level of the fantastic in events of heightened emotion and tension. When you’re in the middle of it, nearly dead, any type of “out” is something so tempting that you might become desperate for it, if only so that you don’t have to relive the horrors of your memory.

It’s just as easy to see how someone might cling, instead, to the stern reality of the world around them. What good is it to dream when you’ve seen so much carnage? What good is softness when the world has shown you how sharp it can be?

If nothing else, we need each other, dividing lines blurred, if we’re going to stay alive.

Warm Hands is Tolkien-like in that Arden writes it as someone would who is intimately familiar with the subject matter: she isn’t expecting to have to explain herself. You either know what various terms mean, or you don’t. It doesn’t take away from the story at all, but it feels very much like she put herself in the time of the Great War, and can tell you about it as if she was there.

Warm Hands is just an incredible story of grief, pain, hope, and resilience. This is a beautiful novel, heartbreaking and rich, and I am so grateful to have read it.

Rarely in the course of European history has Hell felt as salient as in the ugly, savage trench warfare of the 1914 "Great War" (more commonly known as World War One). The blasted fields of Northern France were the direct inspiration for Tolkien's Mordor, a land from a story that also reflects the clash of an old, familiar world with one that is new and terrifying. Katherine Arden captures the violence and tragedy of the battlefield with dreadful elegance, snapping between the primal terror of Freddie, a young Canadian solider struggling to survive alongside a wounded German with whom he has formed a traumatic connection, and the clinical efficiency of his sister Laura, a battlefield nurse determined to discover the fate of her only remaining family.

There are elements of this that read as pure historical fiction, and it is clear Arden diligently researched the era in her quest to bring the horror of the war to life. However, the fantastical elements read equally as true: wandering ghosts and mysterious hotels and and a sharp-tongued violinist of ambiguous mortal status. I think this is because, as Arden addresses later in her author's note, so much of this conflict involved a clash of eras that is often only seen in fantasy and science fiction: fighter planes alongside carrier pigeons, men in suits of armor clashing with men with machine guns. Amid this chaos in terror, it seems only natural that supernatural would creep in at the edges, taking advantage of the miasma of fear, misery, and madness suffusing the continent.

As much as the supernatural in this book feels tangible, it is also a stark metaphor for the mental trauma of war. Freddie's confusion and missing memories, Laura's hallucinations, nightmares, and flashbacks, are all hallmark symptoms of PTSD, something which at their time was categorized as "battle fatigue" if it was considered at all. In bringing to light the toll of Laura and Freddie's experiences, even through a fantastical lens, Arden shines a light on the millions of men and women who suffered invisibly. Overall, I was impressed by the message of hope communicated by the novel. There were ways in which the resolution felt "too" perfect, but I appreciated the focus on love and family, and the strength of even the briefest human connection to see us through enormous suffering.

I've read author Katherine Arden before and I did enjoy her "Bear & the Nightingale", so I wanted to check out her latest offering with such an intriguing title "The Warm Hands of Ghosts." I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but this just wasn't it. It's more of a depressing story set in WWI, which is not a genre I care for at all. I'd say it's really a war story with paranormal elements, maybe?? This is also a very character driven story, but I found most of the characters very unlikeable and rather flat. The historical aspect feels very true & like there was a lot of research done by the author, but the scant romantic aspects get short shrift and were not as developed. I think it tries too much to do too many things. Still, it is different & I applaud that, so there's my 3 stars. My thanks to the publisher & Net Galley for the complimentary DRC, opinions my own

Starting off in the aftermath of the Halifax explosion in Nova Scotia in 1917, Laura Iven nurses the victims while she is still recovering from her own battlefield wounds. She returns to the front to continue at a field hospital but also to look for her missing brother. Powerful insight into the trauma of World War I and the devastating toll it took on its young soldiers. This one stays with you.

Incredible historical fiction of WWI and Halifax which I had no idea had so many tragedies in its history. There is a supernatural thread that slowly and quietly wends its way into the characters' lives and minds and guides the plot as a background character. While it is a relatively short book, I thought it slowed a bit through the middle and could have successfully been even a bit shorter with maybe less hospital work, although I see the author's desire to share the fascinating story of Mary Borden. This book offers engrossing atmosphere of the battles and trenches of WWI that was, at some points, quite difficult to read. A story filled with very powerful imagery and several strong storylines of love.

I really enjoyed this book! It reminded me of The Bear and the Nightingale by this author because both could be considered historical fiction. I look forward to her future novels!

Katherine Arden has done it again! Arden has such a special and unique way of storytelling. The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a must-read for anyone who loves historical fiction, specifically World War I. I loved how Arden incorporated nursing into her story. The story intertwines between nurse Laura and her younger brother who is a soldier fighting in the front of the war. The book was wonderful and hard to put down because I simply wanted to know what would happen.

Thank you NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group-Ballantine and Del Rey for sending me an ARC in exchange of an honest review of the book received.

This was a good story but very challenging to get through. I found little connection to Laura and was more interested in the story of her brother and Winter. This is extremely well written and well researched and a fascinating tale. I just felt like the execution was a bit off.