Happiness is tempered with nuanced reality, but the warm feelings are richer for that. The triumph of love despite war, bigotry, trauma, disability, pride, distance, and other sorrows of life is a beautiful reminder of the goodness in the world and our responsibilities to make more room for goodness, beauty, and love in our own lives. Lovely War is a sweeping, multi-layered romance set in the perilous.

Berry’s historical details are compellingly accurate. Julie Berry will join us to read from and sign her new young adult novel, Lovely War. Love must endure despite the abyss of war, perhaps because of it.

Suffering is essential to the novel’s emotional resonance. Repeatedly, Berry reveals genuine connection.īerry is skillful portraying war, from German-destroyed villages to trenches, as well as racial hatred within the Allied side (Aubrey’s Black). Makes me rather flat, doesn’t it?” She retorts, “I prefer gentlemen who are sharp.” They “get” each other, James’s bad jokes, her affinity for music. for a song which, once played, I’d swear I’d always known.” He responds, “A piece of sheet music, am I?. Hazel, a classical pianist, reveals her feelings for James, “You’re a brand-new piece of sheet music. She’s masterful with dialogue of people falling in love-revealing flashes that show how well-suited they are. Love in time of war could fall into clichés. There’s a counterpoint between godly voice (“Hephaestus would almost worry for the Fates, but they’re tough old cookies.”) and mortal, visceral depth. The deathless gods are shallow because death’s deadline gives life meaning.Īt first, these divine narrators, with voices enjoyably clever but tinged in sarcasm, create problematic distance, except that soon, human feelings permeate the story with page-turning engagement. Aphrodite demonstrates through mortal stories how essential vicissitudes are to love, and hence how she, perfect, cannot be loved. Oh What a Lovely War was created by visionary director Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop ensemble in 1963. Aphrodite offers as defense two pairs of lovers in WWI: Hazel and James, and Aubrey and Collette. In Lovely War’s opening, Hephaestus traps Aphrodite and Ares in a golden net and puts them on trial for infidelity-a Homeric story, now set in WWII.

A lovely war book