Review - In Memoriam by Alice Winn

 

This was a tough one. Ellwood and Gaunt, both 17, desperately in love with each other, but not wanting the other to find out, are on the cusp of World War 1.

At 17, they're both too young to enlist, but the War comes for both young men.

Their relationship comes to a head in the trenches, and in the brief, quiet spaces in between, but that doesn't mean there's going to be a happy ending.

There's something relentless about In Memoriam, in the way it pulls you in to the trenches with Gant and Ellwood, and all the young men they know and get to know over the course of the war.

The book is interspersed with lists of the injured and dead, printed in the newspapers, and - for me the most hauntingly - in Gaunt and Ellwood's boarding school paper.

This is one of those books - it's well-written, and it has stuck with me, but "enjoyment" is the wrong word for how I felt reading it.