France, 1916: Estelle Graham faces a nightmare. Expecting to be met by her beloved husband and their newly-adopted daughter, she instead finds him gravely injured and unconscious in a casualty clearing station. Taking solace in his journals and letters, she fights for his care—and his life.In a farmhouse near the Somme, Captain Jamie Graham is forever changed when he meets young Aveline Perrault. … Aveline Perrault. Damaged by the cold, cruel world around them—made even colder by the war—the pair form an unlikely bond. Aveline finds in her capitaine the father she never had, and with her help, Graham faces the pain from his own childhood that even his loving marriage could not heal.
Discover the depth of love and faith in the face of brutality as they learn to live while surviving the Great War.
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Beautifully crafted, we see Graham’s story from boyhood to present.
I usually don’t read stories about war but this story sucked me in. I love Graham’s background story, the writing was poetic and his relationships with his wife Estelle, Avie and George were beautiful 🙂 Eva Seyler The War in Our Hearts
The War in Our Hearts is a heart-breaking old-timey story, the author’s voice fully in keeping with its Belle Epoque and World War I setting. Graham was raised to be the lord of the manor when his father passed away. The father was abusive to both Graham and his mother, beating them mercilessly. The elder lord brought virginal female tutors to the manor as much to rape them as to educate his sons. Graham loves music; he sings, plays piano and flute, but his father denies him a career in music. Instead he forces Graham to join the military for a six-year term. Graham’s twin brother, George, leads a relatively charmed life in comparison. During Graham’s leave, he meets Estelle and, charmed by her sweetness and her musical ability, determines to woo her.
The novel is written in several points of view: that of Graham (Captain Augustus Graham, a Scottish lord), Estelle (Graham’s wife), and Aveline Perrault (a thirteen-year-old orphan). Seyler moves deftly between points of view. The story present is in France during World War I, but with frequent flashback to Graham’s childhood in Scotland and his military service first in Gibraltar then later in France. Seyler handles these shifts nicely as well. The chapters are short and well-labeled to assist the reader in keeping track of where they are in time. The short chapters also move the pacing along. Old Scottish ballads express what Graham often cannot express himself and add to the musicality that underpins the novel. Their relationship is one of those romantic, love-at-first-sight, until death do they part love stories.
Eva Seyler weaves a family saga that is intimate yet sweeping in scope.
Eva Seyler’s heart-breaking WWI novel spins the tale of Captain
Augustus Graham, a Scottish lord with a love of music made so much
sweeter by the appreciation of his compassionate and fearless wife,
Estelle, and his rescue of Aveline, a thirteen-year-old orphan caught
between the trenches. Tortured by his overbearing father from a young
age, Graham survives his youth with the help of his devoted, yet
seemingly-charmed fraternal twin brother, and his discovery of his own
identity through a natural musicality and faith. Jumping between the
horrors of the trench warfare and the major events of Graham’s life,
Seyler lets us fall in love with our reluctant hero, the same way the
independent Estelle does, by coaxing him out of his protective shell.
When Graham meets Aveline, a victim lost to the horrors of a war-torn
French countryside, he develops a fast kinship and devotion to the
young woman, who is in many ways a reflection of himself. Determined
to return Aveline to Scotland to raise as part of his own family,
Graham finds meaning in the anonymous mud and blood of the Great War,
and a redemption in his own eyes, for the sins of his father. Like the Scottish ballads Graham and Estelle use to vocalize their
love, Seyler’s story is both maddingly sweet and heart-ripping sad,
which is why this reviewer loved this epic tale of love, honor, and
redemption.
I received an ARC of this book in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.