The Fallen Snow

I like historical fiction and I like stories by and about gay men, so picking this up was a no-brainer. Though I will say that I feel slightly misled by the sales blurb for this one because I expected the protagonist's amnesia over the inciting incident to play a bigger role than it did (which is to say, it didn't at all). But that didn't take away from my enjoyment and it remained engaging enough without that potential storytelling device.

Joshua (who I frequently forgot was supposed to be 19 because he was just so sober and somber) returns from the Western Front of WWI with an honorable discharge after a severe injury. He comes home to a small town nestled in the Virginian mountains and hates being thrown into the limelight as the local hero. Chapters alternate between the present in Virginia, and the near past in France, with occasional POV shifts to his mother.

There's a ton of symbolism and imagery in this book between the war chapters taking place in the height of summer and the Virginian chapters in the dead of winter, Joshua's efforts to repair an abandoned stone cabin in the woods, a subplot dealing with a government worker trying to survey and preserve an old forest before it's stripped bare by logging companies, etc. Definitely plenty of themes and literary devices to analyze, though they sometimes felt a touch heavy-handed and it felt like something you'd read in a high school literature class then be asked to write an essay about.

Being a historical fiction novel about a soldier who falls in love with his sergeant during a literal war, I knew not to expect a happy ending, but I also don't feel like there was much of a happy beginning either. Rather than experiencing some tragic ending that I should've seen coming from a mile away, I'm left wondering if these characters actually liked each other. I'm not asking for hot and steamy smut, but I think the spiciest things got was some brief handholding when no one was around; I don't even remember a kiss being mentioned. Maybe it was meant to be insinuated and inferred that there was more happening in the background, but it was too subtle for me to pick up on in this case. Which is fine if the intention was to tell a historical story first and a romance second, I just thought the source of Joshua's inner turmoil should have been shown a little more explicitly.

There were some minor typos and hiccups specifically around the use of quotation marks I kept noticing, but I'm 99% sure this was self-published so I think that comes with the territory. It was a good enough book that I'd recommend it to anyone looking for something more obscure.