Audiobook review 

I found this book to be beautifully written, horrifyingly realistic, intensely painful, stupefying in the scope of suffering it conveys and at times a little weird. I liked the first section of the affair but found I couldn’t really get into the characters. In the second and most important section in the trenches my heart bled for Stephen and his companions, I found them “going over the top” intensely powerful and I don’t think you can come out of reading it without pacifist thoughts about the futility of war. Images from that section will stay with me for a long time. The third section in the seventies I found compelling but it missed the mark for me.

Why Elizabeth go to all that trouble to get the notebooks decoded for us to skip over them in a paragraph or so? <\spoiler>. I just didn’t connect with the women in the book. They felt thinly drawn, stereotypical and illogical. And please

can we ban men from writing childbirth scenes? <\spoiler>. Even some of the minor characters in the trenches felt much more real to me than the lead women. Finally, I found the ending disappointing but the final sentence very beautiful.

For a horrifying beautiful and realistic portrayal of the war I would recommend this completely. For a love story I would give it a miss.