Review: FALL OF POPPIES: Stories of Love and the Great War (William Morrow)

Riding high on the current wave of interest in the Great War, FALL OF POPPIES (William Morrow, March 1) offers lovers of historical fiction a poignant array of stories from some of the genre’s most popular writers. The nine-story collection explores the panoply of emotions that gripped the war-weary world on Armistice Day, dramatizing the effect of the end of conflict on those who survived to see it. Like the blood-red ceramic poppies planted in the moat of the Tower of London to commemorate the war’s fallen soldiers, each story pays tribute, through the evocative, emotional power of fiction, to the soldiers and civilians that experienced the relief, joy, grief, and hope that swept over Europe and America on that long-awaited day.

FALL OF POPPIES includes stories by Jessica Brockmole, Hazel Gaynor, Evangeline Holland, Marci Jefferson, Kate Kerrigan, Jennifer Robson, Heather Webb, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig. Each story exhibits the sound, vivid writing expected of established authors. Linked only by Armistice Day as a point of reference, the collection presents a broad range of characters, settings, and conflicts. The selections move from an Allied hospital in Belgium to a coffee plantation in Kenya to the nightclubs of Paris to a museum in Dublin. Novice pilots, generous sculptors, vengeful mothers, and conscientious objectors all search to make sense of their disrupted lives and disordered worlds. The fallen are mourned as new births are celebrated; aspirations die through tragic mistakes even as happy coincidence opens unimagined futures; destruction and upheaval force change and forge opportunity. It is hope that unites and animates these characters on their disparate paths: the hope of finding their missing, of hugging their beloved, of living another messy, uncertain, yet glorious day. Victim and victor alike struggle to build a future from the ruins of the past, a future all the stronger and more beautiful for the suffering endured along the way.

Readers will appreciate the individual stories for varied reasons, be it unforgettable characters (Webb’s devastated mother, Brockmole’s selfless pilot, Gaynor’s dedicated midwife), unique voice (William’s idealistic airman, Holland’s cautious cabaret dancer), heartrending conflict (Kerrigan’s ill-fated Irish/English romance, Willig’s disastrous misunderstanding), or distinctive historical content (Robson’s masks for the maimed, Jefferson’s underground nurses). Fans of particular authors will be more than satisfied by their favorites’ contributions and grateful for the introduction to the other authors’ work. An engaging, electrifying read, FALL OF POPPIES channels broader questions of love and loss through the prism of the Great War and demonstrates with convincing aplomb why historical fiction enjoys its current appeal.