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The Whispers of War is a gripping story of female friendships and resilience. It touches on emotional themes within the war and internment in WWII Britain, a sensitive topic to this day. Kelly made me care for all the characters, and the plot kept me up into the small hours.
Featuring Julia Kelly’s signature “intricate, tender, and convincing” (Publishers Weekly) prose, The Whispers of War is a moving and unforgettable tale of the power of friendship and womanhood in the midst of conflict.
- Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us . . . Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent . . . The opening two lines immediately depict the soldiers as hurt and vulnerable, victims of the hostile environment, attacked physically by the ‘iced east winds’ and mentally by the ‘silent night’.
- Watching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the wire, The repetition of verbs and the personification of the wind ‘tugging on the wire’ juxtaposes the eerie calmness of the night with what the reader preconceives about war.
- The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow . . . The opening to stanza three is tragically ironic. In literature, dawn is usually a metaphor for new life and new beginnings, but Owen flips this on its head, instead portraying the despair of the men as they have to face another day of pain and sorrow.
- Sudden successive flights of bullets streak the silence. The sibilance in this line has an onomatopoeic effect of making the sounds of the battlefield more relatable to the reader, bringing them into the narrative.
Feb 3, 2020 · 1. There was no one inspirational moment when the idea of The Whispers of War came to me. I don’t remember when I first learned that Britain had interned tens of thousands of people during both world wars, but I grew up knowing about the US internment of Japanese people during WWII.
Jan 17, 2020 · The Whispers of War tells the story of three friends in Britain in 1939 dealing with the potential outbreak of war. Nora’s a socialite who works at the Home Office and is just an overall badass. Hazel is a matchmaker who is herself in an unhappy marriage.
In “Exposure,” Wilfred Owen depicts the fate of soldiers who perished from hypothermia before dawn, exposed to the horrific conditions of open trench warfare.
Jan 14, 2020 · The Whispers of War is a World War II historical fiction novel that examines the impact of the war on a group rarely discussed in history: German immigrants living in Allied nations. As Germany was the aggressor in the conflict and responsible for heinous crimes against humanity, especially the Jewish population, few have endeavored to write a ...
