#Lovely war Julie Berry

[magiqfetus]

Lovely War by Julie Berry destroyed me, and I’m still in her grips. Seriously, this is my favorite book, I cried for an hour after finishing it.

[marvelwasmadeforthebis]

guys i think i found my new favorite book

[scheidungsgrund]

Julie Berry, Lovely War

[clockworkbee]

heyy! can u please reccomend some books about yearning/struggling/fighting for power? thanks <3

im an asoiaf and the folk of air fan and need more books with the *i'm little but i'm coming for the crown* energy)

Hello! (sorry for responding a little late)

‘Yearning, struggling, fighting for power’ books, hmmm 🤔 let's see.

The Bear & The Nightingale | Katherine Arden - a coming of age story (the winternight trilogy) with a badass female protagonist. Some yearning and a hell lot of struggle on the way to fighting for power. [Russian Folklore, Historical Fantasy]

Carry On | Rainbow Rowell - I think it covers all the three things you asked for, even though it's not very plot driven, so like, the fight for power isn't heavy (compared to tfota) and it's aka. Simon Snow trilogy. [Fantasy]

Vicious | V. E. Schwab - book 1 in Villains trilogy with only two books out (book 2 has an open ending; doesn't end on a cliffhanger) I can't say you'll find yearning here (depends on what you think as you read) but there's definitely a fight for power, rivalry and struggle. [thriller, mystery, fantasy]

A Darker Shade of Magic | V. E. Schwab - too freaking much a fight for power by side characters (who do have a pov) with some inner struggle and a little yearning. [Historical Fantasy]

The Song of Achilles | Madeline Miller - a standalone retelling with enough yearning and struggle as well as a fight for power which might end up breaking your heart or maddening you. [Greek mythology retelling]

Lovely War | Julie Berry - a standalone book with loads of struggle and yearning. It's set in world war I so there's that (but not a personal fight for power). [historical fiction, greek mythology]

To Poison a King | S. G. Prince - a fairytale-like setting in which you'll find the protagonist's struggle as well as yearning. There's a fight for power in there too (but again, not as heavy as tfota, and not the fmc’s) [Fantasy]

I'm already responding late to this so here's a few I could think of right away and I'll definitely add more later if I remember any. Thanks for the ask!

—bee 💗

[misterbardman]

Reading Lovely War by Julie Berry is so funny especially after reading the trials of apollo books because in some of the apollo sections there’s a minor background character named Lester.

If I had a nickel for every book I read that included Apollo and a guy named Lester, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that happened twice.

Literally headcanoning that Lester is just also Apollo in this book, it’s funnier that way. Really enjoying this book more than I did when I started it. A little slow in the beginning but about 80 pages in it starts to tie a bit more together and get good.

[inlovewithquotes]

The most ordinary mortal bodies are housed by spectacular souls.

- Lovely War

[ponysbooks]

🎶Lovely war

Julie Berry

🎶🎶🎶🎶.5 (out of five)

🎶Favorite character: Hazel and James

🎶Least favorite character: Ares

🎶Quote: “It was the dimples. Empires have swiveled on less.”

🎶Format: Hardcover.

This novel tells two stories; the first story is about Aphrodite, Hephaestus and Ares, after the lovers enter a hotel and the husband finds them, they have a trial to prove the innocence of the parties, it sounds almost ridiculous, but actually it is quite emotional and sometimes a little funny. In her defense arguments, Aphrodite tells the love story between James and Hazel, a romance that she orchestrates, which takes place in the terrible moments when the First World War, or the Great War, is in full swing. The young couple fall in love at first sight and have to survive the separation and the horrors of war.

It has a lot of beautiful phrases and despite the fact that I am not much of the "love at first sight" trope, these two lovers are very sweet and also, you have to take into account the historical situation in which they found themselves, and that marriages at first sight really happened, because young people were not sure what would happen at the front, so they wanted to have a reason to return.

There are cultural things that I don't love that the author misdescribed, but in reality they don't affect the story at all, but it bothers me LOL. Overall the whole story is beautiful and sweet.

[rinrinlovee]

*tips hat* hope you're having a lovely morning/evening, m'lady (or idk whatever time it is where you are)

Might I request a book recommendation?

what genre of books do you like?

[sweetaswater]

so i’m currently reading a lovely war by julie berry for the first time. i am only on page 98 and i already know this is going to be in my top 5 favorites

[lackablazeical]

haiiiii!!!! I've been vv scatter brained, bUT. I HAVE SONGS-

they aren't all specific to characters, so you can pick n choose who gets what n where

The Ballad of Sara Berry: unsure of why i feel this, I'm thinking Mikey. the whole story of trying to be the best till you eventually decide I'm automatically the best if my competition are dead, and they're all bitches anyway.

Hadestown, but specifically the song "Word to the Wise" (at 59:55 in the video) gives me April w the gossip mill energy

Beetlejuice the Musical, specifically That Beautiful Sound (and the Girl Scout song if u wanna see what lead up to T.B.S). I get Donnie w Razor Sharp Grin w this because why not revel in the midst of fearful and distressful screams that you are responsible for.

Mean Girls Musical, World Burn. it gives pyromaniac Mikey w the burning, fire, destructive aspects (same Mikey-). and it could work w April as well w the gossip mill and airing dirty laundry when necessary.

Slap a Btch, Rico Nasty. Ralph. that's it, all I got, some parts of it lyrically works w him, but it's also just the general vibe he's got. like Jade West w her "I'll pop ur head like a pimple." but he can also be kinda like soft Blue's Clues energy.

Super Psycho Love gives Leo, unsure as to why cause like. idk, the genre doesn't fit w the puzzle pieces of his character that I have-

also just. Partners in Crime. that is all-

Hiiiii music <33

For the first one I definitely get both Leo and Mikey vibes. Honestly lowkey all the Hamatos LMAO like

Well, Sara Berry was a popular bitch // Hot bod', hot boy, cheer captain, plus she was rich

You taste the silver Sara, you taste the crown // You thirst for blood from the roses in hand // Whoa, you spoil for sash and scepter, music to dance

Some girls are rational but Sara was not // She stared in mirrors thinking one single thought (Julie) // There's seven reasons this crown's not good as got (Anne, Eunice, Raquel, Marianna) // And so the night of prom, mercy, thus went her plot (Patricia, Quiara)

ALL OF THESE MAKE ME THINK OF THE HAMATOS WISHWKSNS

And the April one is so real my girlfriend LOVES hadestown so I appreciate the recc >:]]

I need to listen to more of the Beetlejuice musical too cus you're spot on w/ the Donnie idea- these Lyrics are SO him

The sound of a scream, is music to me // A sound that says fifteen years full-time therapy // Trauma and fear, it sings in my ear // Ain't it the sweetest noise around, that beautiful sound?

Panic and stress // Oh ain't it the best? // The sound of heart // Exploding inside a chest // It fills you with pride // We're ruining lives

AND WORLD BURN- OOUGH- How I didn't see April and Mikey is BEYOND ME WKBWKWNS

My name is Regina George and I am a massive deal // I will grind you to sand beneath my Louboutin heel // This is what I get for helping, helping someone lame fit in

I wanna watch the world burn, I got the gasoline // I wanna watch the world burn and everyone get mean

Because you took me down // But you didn't finish me off // My name is Regina George // And in case you're keeping score // Cady may have won the battle // But I will win the war

For Smack a Bitch, I get Raph vibe wise but also it's SUCH a Mikey vibe like oh my GOD so I'll just add it to both their playlists snrk

I get what you mean about Leo tho!!! Like some are a lil funky but like. These lines are so real

You're gonna // Be with me // I know you want me too // I think you want me too // Please say you want me too // Because you're going to // Say that you want me every day // That you want me every way

And of COURSE Partners in Crime is the Hamatos Be REALLLLLLL

[galvanizedfriend]

Hi friend! Any really good books you read this year?

-Amanda

Hi, Amanda! 💖 Happy new year, friend! Hope you great one.

I didn't read as much as I wish I had this part year (just 25 books in total), so my pool of choices is kinda small, and some of them were awful. So I'll tell what my favorite books of the year were.

. The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne Honestly, favorite book of the year and I think it's become one of my all-time favorites. This book is about awful, depressing things, yet it is told with such heart and such tenderness and with such a sensitive humor that it's not at all a rough read. There are very sad parts, but the narrator is so endearing, and some of the characters so completely bonkers, it just feels like you're being comforted the whole time. The line here is so thin, because the book encompasses so many terrible times and terrible situations (it starts in post-war Ireland and goes all the way to, I think, the early 2000s), but it's brilliantly executed. The story is pretty magnificent, as is the writing, but the background political and social aspects of the story are also incredible, tbh. . Lovely War by Julie Berry This is such an understated and delicate, sensitive book. It's almost 500 pages long, and it felt so much shorter. I just flew through it. It's a historical fiction about two couples who come together in the chaos of World War I. The twist is that the book is narrated by Greek gods, mostly Aphrodites, but others as well, as their influence over humans' fates gets explained in how love and war comes together. It's a really fascinating read. It got me very emotional in so many parts, and I hardly every cry reading, but this one definitely got a few tears. It's really beautiful.

. The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah Kristin Hannah has a formula with her books that always gets me. It's always a historical fiction, and it's always centered around women, and women's struggles, and women's relationships, during these particular slices of time. THis one was about a time period I frankly knew very little about because it's not something that we hear or study about in-depth in my country, which is the Dust Bowl period in post-Great Depression USA. The main character here is someone with a lot of trust and confidence issues, but who has an incredibly strong character, coming into herself and her power and her voice during the most devastating of times, while trying to save her family. She leaves her home and the only people that had ever embraced her in her entire life during the Dust Bowl period because her son nearly dies from dust pneumonia (something else I didn't know existed) and moves to the west, where she is basically treated like garbage, alongside thousands of other migrants like herself, who were trying to escape the poverty and hunger caused by the drought and the great depression. I had no idea this had happened in US history, and not only is the story of this woman so compelling and so heartbreaking, the background was also incredibly interesting to read about (for me, at least). This was not my first historical novel by Hannah and it will not be the last.

. Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe This is a non-fiction investigative story about the Sackler family and the opioid crisis in the United States. This book is incredible, and it gives you such an in-depth look into how fucked up big pharma is (and just how protected they are by the system). It tells the story of how the Sacklers built their empire, and what was the whole logic behind OxyContin and the way it was distributed was (it's fucking EVIL), thus kicking off one of the worst health crisis in the history of the United States, and it all started with pain medication. There's a show on Netflix based on this, but it's not half as good as the book. Dopesick is much better, but it's also more focused on the victims of the opioid crisis, while this paints you a pretty great picture of who (some of) the villains are.

Also unrelated, but if you're into podcasts, this guy, Patrick Radden Keefe, has an investigative podcast where he basically chases this story that got to him about how the song Winds of Change by The Scorpions was actually written by the CIA to be illegally released in the USSR towards the end of the cold war in order to disrupt society and rile the people up against the system, which apparently really did happen. It became like a hymn for the end of the USSR. The whole premise is crazy, but as he goes deeper into it you start to realize it's very, very likely to be true, because the CIA does crazier things. Also his storytelling is really great.

[clockworkbee]

—Lovely War, by Julie Berry

[chronotopes]

PERSONAL WRITING WRAPPED 2023

Getting this done significantly earlier than I got it done last year, which I think may in itself be an indication of being in "a better mental place."

Let's get to it.

CREATIVE NONFICTION, NEW FIRST DRAFTS:

"Catalogue of Thoughts, With Rebukes," January. CLASSIC katia journal entry turned essay format, which is "conversation between versions of myself." Artistic enough suffering that it totally counts as a cnf essay.

"I Can't Remember..." (titled in real life "my homework from brenda and julie"), January. Essay Written For Practice, specifically inspired by the prompt "Write an essay where every sentence starts with 'I can't remember.' Cathartic and has some bits of very pretty prose. Maybe I don't agree with the overall conclusions it draws, but I sure like it as a piece of writing.

"As the sun sets over [my local river], I consider Joan of Arc," January. broooo why were my early-in-the-year cnf titles so pretentious. Lyric essay meets prose poem but I'm choosing to classify it as a lyric essay. First draft dictated into my voice memos, mad scribe style. Man i used to love voice memos.

"Elegy for a life I can't live," April. Boooo emo bullshit booo but once again cathartic and perhaps more clear-sighted about things than the previous work. Anaphora got me through a lot in the first half of this year.

"I don't understand music," April. Finally, creative nonfiction that isn't about depressing shit! About a) piano and b) love, obviously. Needs a lot of editing but I am fond of her.

"Orthodox," July. Old poem about national identity and religion that I reformulated into a very unpolished essay.

"Two gay preteens and a lake monster," July. Another old poem, reformulated into a flash essay this time. Polished it enough to submit to a call for flash essay submissions and then never did.

"Nikolayevna," July. ALSO an old poem reformulated into a flash essay. This is my favorite trick and I will do it to all of my mid-but-promising poetry one day. This one's about ~generational cycles!~

"My dead boss and my dead friend," July. New addition to my senior spring flash essay series from last year.

"A spoiler, displaced in time," July. Another new addition to the senior spring flash essay, in an effort to make it more rounded with context I did not then have.

"[personal bullshit relevant situation], or 'The Kids from Yesterday.'" The Senior Spring Essays in their totality cannot ever seen the light of day for many reasons and one of them is that the ending rests partly on an MCR-based metaphor. Which is very silly.

"Justifications," October. Oh lord back to For Processing Purposes Only creative nonfiction. That's cool I guess. Mad about how good the prose in these quasi-journal entries is and the degree to which i did not write enough of them this year.

12 pieces in total.

CREATIVE NONFICTION, NEW DRAFTS OF OLD STUFF AND UNFINISHED BUT PROMISING NEW STUFF.

"Catalogue of Kitchenware," February-August. What it sounds like.

"Obsidian Greythorne's Depression Cannot Be Cured By Finding A New, Alive Girlfriend" and "Fornax And Annue Cannot Ever Have Sex For Reasons I Just Made Up," March-June. Two entries in an envisioned series of essays exploring adolescent sexuality/identity/experience through old fictionwriting adventures.

"Catalogue of Berries," July. Eastern Europe posting.

"On Taking the Waters," July. I said "Oh, I know what's missing from this old essay about being very sad in bath!" and stuck my friend who died in there. Classic essay trick.

"A Grand Palatial House of the Old South," July. Heterosexual roommate angst processing essay, refined.

"On being old enough to talk about the war," July. Flash essay (really edging out of flash essay territory, it got long) from last year about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, completely rewritten.

"A Hill in the [local civil war history location]," July. Also a flash essay from the senior spring essays, rewritten enough to count as a newish thing.

"A Car Is Like A Little House," August. Suburbia, weather, immigration, the interstate highway system, all the usual suspects in my writing.

Nine pieces in total.

POETRY:

"Myopia in seventh-grade notebooks," January. "It is january 2023, and one year ago I should have known better. / And unlike all of the other times I ruined my life, that time, it was for forever." Less Vent Poetry and more unified concept worth working from. About reading notes to myself in old diaries.

"Novice time traveler," February. Jesus christ reading through these is killing me. This one shares a lot of ideas with dialogues but is less good lol.

"3/23/2022," February. A sestina I wrote for Gabe on the occasion of our first anniversary, and certainly a sestina I like a lot more than the first sestina I wrote. Not groundbreaking stuff but I like it anyway. I would have to take a Real Poetry Class to get properly good at poetry, I think. For those curious: my words were moon, dare, blossom, spring, test, and time.

I would write Gabe little poems every day for the last few months of being longish-distance. Not all of them were good, and I cannot count them to save my life, but among them were "Sonnet for a job application," "Sonnet for an orchestra concert," "February Villanelle," "Sonnet for warmth," "Sonnet for Spring," "For Dusk," "For the sinking sun." Some of them will be something one day. Others had value in their ephemeral Baby Poem status.

Ten completed pieces in total, a whole lot more little stuff than that.

FICTION:

52 or so thousand words of what was once titled Adventures of the Extranei and is now titled fucking, like, Untitled Quartz the Novel Project, June-November. What started out as last year's fascination with an old, sprawling, deeply flawed novel turned into a perhaps-ill-advised attempt to rename (almost) all the characters and rewrite it to be coherent. Currently, it exists in the form of a 100-page outline and one nanowrimo's worth of novel (three parts out of like twelve complete). I'll go back to it after I finish Aivide, if only because of Sunk Cock Theory.

A rewritten prologue to what was once titled Adventures of the Extranei: The Next Generation and is now titled Dude If You Rewrite All Of Nextgen Too You're Going To Have To Start Asking For Money For It Because Seriously We're Talking 500k+ words of story here. What can I say, sometimes the grip of "I could do this BETTER" overtakes you.

Three edited existing chapters and one brand new revised chapter of AIVIDE THE PREQUEL, August-December. READ IT HERE, unless you haven't read Vinbre the Novel yet, in which case read Vinbre the Novel first. Very proud of the ways I've sneakily grown as a writer since first drafting the last three chapters, very glad for the opportunity to write it as I see it now and share it with the world.

About 85,000 words in total if you only count the completely new chapter of Aivide, somewhere around 100,000 if you count stuff I added to the old ones. I could probably be more accurate about it if I wasn't writing this at 2 AM on new year's eve. (Afternoon after edit: About 37,000 new words of Aivide + 51,980 words of Quartz + 10,007 words of nextgen bullshit = just about 98,000 words of fiction. yippee!!)

Overall, 26 completed(ish) pieces in total, counting the venty drafts and the revisions, which constituted a lot of what I wrote this year.

SUPERLATIVES:

Most Economical: "Two Gay Preteens and a Lake Monster," "My Dead Boss and My Dead Friend"

Most Romantic: "I don't understand music"

Greatest Potential: "A car is like a little house," "Orthodox"

Best Emerging Genre: Essay collections

Biggest Comeback: Fiction

Most Likely To Succeed: "Catalogue of Berries," "On Taking the Waters," "Orthodox," "A Car is like a little house"

The One You Should Read: Aivide the Prequel

Worst Girls of the Year: Quartz Greythorne and Aivide Thieri

[inlovewithquotes]

Kisses by the billions happen every day, even in a lonely world like ours. But this is a kiss for the ages.

- Lovely War

[eternalfayee]

this may be niche but i’ve been slacking when it comes to my craft recently and not talking with my deities a whole lot but i started reading lovely war by julie berry and it’s motivating me to start talking with my deities again 😭🫶🏾

[loveletterstothesoul]

If music stops, and art ceases, and beauty fades, what have we then?

— Julie Berry, Lovely War