Alice Winn (1) (1992–)

If you Google "approach-avoidance conflict" don't be surprised if this book shows up at the top of the results. I can't remember a book that I both anticipated and dreaded so strongly. Only the assurance from other reviewers about the ending (both MCs still alive and together) kept me going through horrific battle scenes that demonstrated numerous gruesome ways to die. Alice Winn perfectly captures the innocence and enthusiasm of the boys who enlisted, the devastating erasure of their show more ideals, and the stiff upper lip culture that provided no empathy for their broken bodies and minds. Viewed through that lens, Ellwood and Gaunt's love is apparent in every nuance of their interactions despite the added complexities of homophobia and xenophobia.

5 stars, will inevitably buy a copy for myself but will need to summon my emotional strength reserves before re-reading. show less

It blows my mind that this is a debut novel, such is its sophistication in pulling you in and holding you there. In Memoriam is a novel about the complexities of a gay love affair between two young men at a boarding house of Marlborough College and then at the front in WWI at a time when homosexuality was a crime punishable with a prison term.

Winn captures how the young men were wont to hide their true homosexuality behind the boarding school practice of fagging, which was common in the show more period, and the difficulty of admitting their true feelings to each other until their life hangs in the balance at the front.

More than just a novel about a forbidden love, it is a dramatic and heartbreaking depiction of life on the front for young public school teenagers who had hitherto been cloistered in the safety of their boarding schools in the rolling green fields of England. Its title is derived from a mixture of the poem by Tennyson and the regular in memoriam notices that are published in the Preshute's boarding house's press bulletins.

Winn writes with such immense confidence about the period setting, both in the boarding school and on the battlefield, that she completely enfolds you and transports you to the era.

4.5 stars - this will definitely be up there as one of my favourite reads of 2024. show less

In Memoriam, Alice Winn’s stunning debut, is a First World War love story about two British public-school boys desperate to become men before they are ready. By lying about their ages to enlist, they erase themselves early, setting the novel’s brutal emotional logic: youth pressed into shapes it cannot survive.
The fierce comradeship of the public-school system hardens and then fractures under war, tipping into intimacy forged by fear, boredom, and grief. Winn writes with restraint and show more precision, letting loss accumulate without sentimentality—and hit harder for it.
Immersive, devastating, and unexpectedly tender, In Memoriam insists on the endurance of love in a world built to destroy it. Wildly romantic. Strangely uplifting. show less

I can identify a host of potential problems with this novel, but also, I absolutely loved it. I am always reading several books at a time, and tend to jump back and forth, but this is the book I wanted to be reading the whole time. It was urgent and immersive and I could not put it down.

Briefly, this follows Ellwood and Gaunt as they go from boarding school to the battlefields of WWI. This is gruesome and painful and depends upon real diaries of real soldiers to tell the stories of the show more wholesale slaughter of Allied soldiers -- trench warfare was much bloodier than what we have seen of war in the past 50 years. Elwood and Gaunt are lovers (in the emotional and physical sense) and their beautiful love, their world of poetry and trust and sex, illegal in its time, is the center around which this story is built. Mostly though, the book is about war, about the insanity of sending 17 and 18-year-old boys into battle where schoolyard rivalries and cruelties become deadly, killing some and destroying what is good in others. It is about how we define masculinity and class, and how destructive are those definitions. It is about the tolls of dying in battle and of living through it.

I cried more than once, and I am not a crier. Objectively there are things here that were manipulative in ways I don't usually like and which I complain about in other books, but I have zero complaints about them here. Off-hand comments about close families losing all of their sons one after the other, brutal cinematic killings of the kindest characters, and visible maiming of the most beautiful were knitted into the text at various points. I don't know if my "okayness" with these things is due to Winn's propulsive writing, or if it was because her depiction of war and of these characters were so well developed. Whatever the reasons my reactions felt authentic and I knew I would have had them even if she had not inserted those "kick the puppy" moments.

I listened to this book, and the narrator, Christian Coulson, was so very good. I am sure this is great in print, but I feel confident the reader added beauty and depth, and that I felt more intimately tied to Gaunt and Ellwood because of his performance. show less