Usually, historical fiction is not really my jam, but I was really surprised at how much I really enjoyed this one! A little spooky and lots of historical drama and intrigue. Loved it!

I absolutely adored the Winternight Trilogy so I was very excited about this one. However, it did not live up to my expectations. While it was a solid book, it didn't grab me the way her other books did. It was still an engaging story, and I do plan to read future books by this author.

“Reality was a crumbling thing, a rotten tree.”

I put this book down initially because it has a slow start and I generally prefer faster paced books but I’m so glad I came back to this. This was a beautiful story. The ideas Arden is playing with—apocalypse, hell, people being thrust into a new world they aren’t prepared for—were so deeply realized. As a big romance reader I of course wanted the smidges of romance to take up more room but that’s not a fault of this books just a personal insatiable hunger. Read in tandem with the audiobook and especially liked Laura’s POV’s narrator. While I understand Freddie was losing himself throughout and that played into his character’s representation, I did want more characterization with Laura and Winter. They felt painted in broader strokes outside of their specific situations. The other characters—Jones, Pim, Mary, Faland—felt very genuinely realized and I was so engaged in their personalities and missions. Rounding up to 5⭐️.

Overall so so beautiful and definitely lots to think about :’)

“'Iven, we were dead together, we were born together. I cannot live without you.’ He didn’t sound happy about it. In fact, he sounded much the way Freddie felt, as though he’d been changed against his will, and was marking out the new boundaries of himself.”

(rounded down from 3.5)

Katherine Arden has written a very interesting story, combining the history or World War I and a sci-fi/fantasy/magical realism aspect. The narration switches between the POV of Laura Iven, a nurse from Halifax, Canada, who was badly injured while serving in Belgium and France, and her brother, Freddie, a soldier still in Europe, who has been reported to Laura as missing in action/presumed dead.

Arden describes the brutality of WW1’s warfare. You can tell she’s done her homework! The concept of shell-shock, which we now call PTSE is explored, along with the realities of dealing with mass casualty situations.

I was most interested in Freddie’s part of the story, with him waking up in total darkness after a major explosion on the battlefield. He’s in total darkness and eventually realizes there’s another soldier in there with him. The two of them band together to try to save themselves, even though both are wounded and the other man is the enemy: a German soldier.

The supernatural aspect of the book didn’t grab me that much, unfortunately. There’s a mysterious hotel in the middle of bombed out Belgium which is run by a “fiddler”. Soldiers who go there drink wine and forget their troubles. Literally. There are a lot of biblical references to the end of days, much of which I didn’t relate to, as a non-Christian reader. Apparently the chapter titles are biblical quotes.

The ending was a little too pat.

Thank you to NetGalley and Del Rey for the opportunity to read a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

“Ghosts have warm hands.” World War I historical fiction!

Laura receives her brother’s dog tags and uniform in the mail. This means that Freddie has died in World War I. She’s devastated but has a feeling that he isn’t dead. She leaves her Canadian home and travels back to World War I and takes up her mantle as a war nurse again to search for any information she can find about Freddie. What she discovers will change her life forever.

Likes/dislikes: Laura’s strength, perseverance, and love for her brother makes her a great character. My heart warmed as Freddie and the German soldier helped each other and became like brothers. I appreciated the World War I setting and learned quite a bit about its history. I didn’t know about the Halifax explosion before I read this book.
Language: R for 93 swears and 3 f-words.
Mature Content: PG-13 for adults drinking.
Violence: R for bloody deaths.
Ethnicity: falls to white.

Katherine Arden writes some of the most haunting and sweeping historical fantasy that I've had the delight to read -- The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a novel that will linger with me for a long time. Exquisite!

I have been dying to read this book since before it came out. I love everything I have read by the author thus far. This was no exception. It was just beautiful. I had so many emotions while reading. Laura, a combat nurse in the Great War, gets news that her brother might not have really died. From there she embarks on a journey for the truth. What she finds is so much more. There is magical realism and a bit of fantasy mixed in to make such a wonderful story. Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine for the arc in exchange for my honest review.

This was only just okay. I felt like the story was slow and the ending didn't pay off the way I was hoping

The Warm Hands of Ghosts was a pleasant surprise for me. After a slow start I started doubting this book would be for me, but once the pacing picked up I ended up getting super invested in the characters stories, specially Freddie and Hans.

Arden has a good atmospheric prose that captures the essence of the era, and the way the story unravels is tragically beautiful.

It’s not gonna be a book I could safely recommend to anyone, but this almost makes it more special. I think the right readers will find a precious gem in this story.

Absolutely OBSESSED with this book! WOW! Phenomenal writing, prose, etc. I am a huge fan of anything spooky, and this hit the mark.

I quite liked this...a combination of Faust, Tales of Arabian Knights, and All Quiet on the Western Front. Was skeptical, but it was quite compelling. When her parents are killed in the Halifax explosion in 1917, and she curiously receives BOTH sets of ID tags from her brother fighting on the Western Front and reported dead, Laura Ivers goes in search of her brother, a sensitive poet named Wilfred (hm....a not so subtle nod to Wilfred Owen). Freddie has seen the most horrendous horrors on the front, and has survived with the help of a German soldier. But when the mysterious Monsier Faland offers respite in his "hotel" and wine in exchange for stories as he plays his violin, the plot is set in motion. Laura has to save her brother, but knows the compulsion to follow Faland as she herself has felt his pull. A sort of surreal WW1 story, but it really works! Enjoyed it immensely.

As someone who’s read both Arden’s Winternight series and her middle grade horror series - this standalone novel is a fairly marked deviation from her typical fantasy lite approach to storytelling. And if I’m honest I’m not sure it’s totally working for me - but that might be my general resentment towards the commodifcation of World War fiction.

Arden takes a slightly speculative approached (i.e. the ghosts) to tell a story about siblings and trauma and the catastrophe of a war that has fallen in the shadow of a much greater one. And I do understand the sentiment of World War I being the often less explored great war of the 20th century and deserving it’s remembrance but… it’s still an extremely “popular” time period to write fiction in. Perhaps not all of these stories have a slightly paranormal twist like Arden was hinting at here - but I feel like the events of this book can easily be read as just psychological trauma. Not ghosts. Which leaves you with… just another World War I historical fiction book.

The only relationship I ended up caring about was Freddy and Winter’s dynamic unfortunately. Which is not great if you consider the driving force and narration of the novel to be Laura and her determination to find her brother. She never really felt like a person to me, beyond this goal she had set in her mind, and once that goal was accomplished she felt even less like one. I know Katherine Arden is more than capable of writing a compelling female lead but this was not… it.

I’m disappoitned that I don’t love this, because the Winternight trilogy is truly one of my favorite fantasy series of all times. But I understand this was a very involved and extensively researched project for the author, and respect what it means to her.

Thank you to the publisher Del Rey for providing an e-ARC via NetGalley for an honest review.

"We won, screamed the people outside. Don't they know, Laura thought, we all lost?"

The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden is the first fictional, supernatural WWI book I have ever read, so it all felt very new and innovative. Personally, someone could write almost anything on WWI or WWII (fictional or nonfiction), and as long as it is well-researched and the writing is okay, I will probably love it. So, The Warm Hands of Ghost was off to a good start for me before I even began reading the first page. And it kind of lived up to my internal hype.

The pros: I loved learning about a part of history that I previously didn't know much about (also a great representation of an aspect of history that I feel isn't as well known). I liked that Laura was a bit unlikeable. I liked the depiction of Freddie, and felt that it was an accurate portrayal of how young men were when they were sent off to war during WWI and WWII (although they could have made him a bit younger to be more historically accurate). I like the concept of Faland and supernatural hotels that open up to lost soldiers and delving into the psychological impact of war.

The cons: The writing was a bit choppy, and the jumping back and forth between Freddie and Laura felt clunky at times. I have read (and loved) a few of Katherine Arden's previous books, and the writing doesn't quite compare (likely because it is meant to be historically accurate to how people spoke back in 1918, so I give it some leeway). Nothing in The Warm Hands of Ghosts struck a chord in me that I feel will be overly lasting, which is kind of hard to do with a WWI or WWII-centered novel. It was a good book, but not amazing, not life-changing (at least for me).

3.75 / 4 stars. I understand how immensely difficult it is to write about war and do it justice. Finger-snaps to Katherine Arden for doing it. Thank you Katherine Arden, Del Rey, and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden
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During the Great War, combat nurse Laura searches for her brother, who is believed to be dead in the trenches. But she has reason to believe he is still alive somewhere.
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This book is kind of an atmospheric historical fantasy? I listened to the author’s note at the end and how she was feeling like writing a steampunk book and felt like this time period in history was the closest to steampunk.

I listened to the audio and I think reading this with my eyes might have been a little easier to follow the story. I was confused about one character for awhile, who they were and what they were trying to accomplish in the story. By the time it got to the end I had figured him out ( I think).

My favorite part of this story was the Doctor that Laura worked with. He was kind and wanted to help Laura because he cared for her. Otherwise the whole story was very sad, how awful humans can be to each other, and how much suffering there was during the war.

3⭐️⭐️⭐️ If I’m being honest, I think I would have struggled to get through this book if I hadn’t have listened to the audio. It was a good story, I just did not have any strong emotions about it.

A lovely read! Im a big fan of Katherine Ardens novels overalls, and while this one is more of a Historical Fiction novel, i enjoyed it a lot!

I’m such a huge Katherine Arden fan and this just further solidified that fact! She’s such a talent with an utterly enchanting and unique voice. This book surprised me and broke my heart at times. Wow, just loved it start to finish.

Thank you to NetGalley, Random House Publishing Group, and Katherine Arden for my advanced copy of this book!

As a fan of The Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden, I was eager to dig into this book. In The Warm Hands of Ghosts, we follow two different perspectives at two different times. Firstly, we follow combat nurse Laura in the present on her mission to uncover the truth of her brother Freddie's death. Secondly, we follow Freddie in the past and get his timeline of events. What I truly love about all of Arden's writing is the way that she makes everything so incredibly atmospheric. She has a way of luring readers into her world through her style and imagery. Her research and attention to detail and culture are meticulous and noteworthy.

I thought this was a fantastic Historical Fiction read with a touch of magic. The only thing that would have made this better in my mind would be to read during the colder months. I think this leans into how much of a setting and atmosphere she drops the reader into.

Overall, I will always pick up a Katherine Arden book, regardless of the topic.

Thank you so much to Netgalley and the publisher for so graciously providing me qirh this e-ARC! I am very thankful and once read will update this review placeholder with my thoughts and also review on my Social medias.

I'm a huge Katherine Arden fan. Her "Winternight" trilogy is a favorite of mine.

And while Arden's latest falls a bit short of the "Winternight" perfection that came before it, it's an engrossing read for the most part. She mentions in the author's note how "The Warm Hands of Ghosts" gave her fits and took her ages to write, and the trouble she had during the writing process shows itself within the pages. The book isn't as tight as her others -- certain elements of the plot are murky (exactly what is Faland?) and the ending is weak, what with how Arden wraps it all up a bit too easily and how one particular character's motivations seem nonsensical.

But I liked the book. Arden knows how to write an engaging story, and I immediately took to Laura, the protagonist. I couldn't stop reading it, despite the mild disappointment and frustration I experienced alongside my enjoyment.


My sincerest appreciation to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the digital review copy. All thoughts herein are my own.

3.5 stars

This book kind of fell middle of the road for me. I love historical fiction but like a few years after this one takes place. I really liked reading from Laura's perspective because there was adventure and traveling as well as a healing journey but I really didn't like Freddie's pov the war but it could just be that I am not big on war pov's.

Katherine Arden's ability to weave words into worlds is unmatched. I just had a little bit of a difficult time with this one.

Thank you to Del Ray and Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.