Lovely War

Overview

"Lovely War" opens not on a battlefield but in a Manhattan hotel room, where Aphrodite has been caught in an indiscretion and must talk her way out of judgment before an assembly of fellow gods. Her defense takes the form of a story: the intertwined fates of four young people scattered across Europe during the First World War.

Hazel, a London pianist, and James, an architecture student turned soldier, fall in love in the anxious weeks before his regiment ships out. Their story runs parallel to that of Aubrey, a gifted ragtime musician from Harlem serving in a segregated American army unit, and Colette, a Belgian singer whose family did not survive the German occupation. As the two couples' paths cross, Aphrodite's storytelling is repeatedly interrupted by Ares, Hephaestus, and Apollo, each with a competing claim on how the tale — and the war itself — should be understood.

What unfolds is less a single narrative than a mosaic of romance, loss, and music, held together by the conceit that the oldest gods have always meddled in human affairs, and that love and violence have always been intimates.

A Myth Retold Through History

Berry's choice to narrate a historical novel through the mouths of squabbling Greek deities does more than add novelty; it lets the book argue that the emotional forces driving her human characters — desire, jealousy, courage, grief — are ancient and impersonal, indifferent to the century in which they surface. The device also allows the novel to move fluidly between registers, from the intimate scale of a courtship to the vast, mechanized violence of trench warfare, without losing its narrative thread.

The novel sits alongside Berry's other genre-crossing young adult work, which has consistently paired unconventional structures with meticulous historical research. Here, that research surfaces most notably in the story of Aubrey and his fellow Black soldiers, whose service and artistry — inspired by real regiments like the Harlem Hellfighters — have often been marginal to popular memory of the war. Critical reception has largely praised the novel for using its mythic frame to smuggle in overlooked history, giving equal narrative weight to a war fought on the front and a war fought against prejudice at home and in the ranks.

Why Lovely War Has Been Challenged

The passages most often singled out by challengers are Aphrodite's own recollections of her affair with Ares, told with a sensuous candor that carries over into the courtships of Hazel and James and of Colette and Aubrey, as well as the novel's unsparing depiction of combat injuries and death. Equally scrutinized is its handling of the racism Aubrey and his fellow Black soldiers endure, which includes period-accurate slurs and casual cruelty from fellow American servicemen.

Objectors have generally argued that the sexual content is too explicit for the book's teenage audience, and that the racial language, even when used to expose historical bigotry rather than endorse it, is upsetting enough to warrant restriction. The novel's frank pairing of wartime violence with adolescent romance has likewise struck some reviewers as a mismatch for younger readers within its intended age range. Within the scope of this catalog, those objections have led to a formal challenge in one state and one school district.