On Wings of Song
On Wings of Song
On Wings of Song
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Average rating4
"A chance meeting they never forgot. Six years after meeting British soldier Aiden Foster during the Christmas Truce of 1914, Jochen Weber still finds himself thinking about Aiden, their shared conversation about literature, and Aiden's beautiful singing voice. A visit to London gives Jochen the opportunity to search for Aiden, but he's shocked at what he finds. The uniform button Jochen gave him is the only thing Aiden has left of the past he's lost. The war and its aftermath ripped everything away from him, including his family and his music. When Jochen reappears in his life, Aiden enjoys their growing friendship but knows he has nothing to offer. Not anymore"--Blurb.
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CW for battle scenes that include somewhat graphic descriptions of death and dying.
3.5 stars. Read this on Boxing Day 2020, and it was a fitting end to holiday reading for the year. Gentle (despite the early depictions of battle carnage), mostly chaste romance between English and German MCs who meet during a brief respite from WWI and are reunited several years after the war's end. While the main conflicts are the anti-German sentiment that follows Jochen, Aiden's PTSD that has robbed him of his voice, and the overall danger of being queer at that time, there is also the reader's knowledge that in less than 30 years the world will once again be torn apart by an even more brutal war.
I suspect if I had read this book five years ago, it wouldn't have made much of an impression on me. But in 2020 I am desperate for stories that portray human goodness in the face of difficult times, and I found myself more emotionally engaged than I would have predicted. I guess it was the right book at the right time for me.
