When James first sees Hazel, she is playing piano at a dance, just as he is preparing to head off to the war that will be called World War I. While their meeting may be by chance, we soon learn that the Gods are aware of both Hazel and James and that if the horror of a war is to bring them together, perhaps a true kind of love might result. Theirs is not the only love story born in war, however, and as we view the last year of the War to End All Wars along with James and Hazel, we meet other players in the Gods' symphony, handsome musicians and heartbroken friends and while there is no one the war does not touch in Britain and France in 1917-18, no way to avoid the suffering of such a conflict, good seeds are still planted - and no one knows that better than the Gods.
I know my summary up there isn't doing this book justice, it is SO GOOD. It feels solidly grounded in the time and place but with the Greek Gods plot device, we do move around a bit in a way that is so intriguing and seamless. The love stories are delightful and believable. There is a race relations and racism storyline that I really appreciated and while it's not perfectly done, I learned about and thought about Black soldiers and their families fighting a war for a country that treated them like trash - and we NEED to think about that. This story just whizzed by for me and I appreciated that while it tells, in some ways, a tale as old as time, it wasn't predictable and the characters made me care about them. So glad I finally read this.
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