On Wings of Song

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.