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There are currently 27 member reviews
for Two Storm Wood
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Joy E. (Rockville, MD)
What Went On in Two Storm Wood?
Philip Gray's novel Two Storm Wood provides all the misdirection and moral ambiguity that you could want in a mystery.
Immediately after the World War I armistice, Amy Vanneck travels from England to France to get answers about the fate of her fiancé in the last months of the war. What does "missing in action" mean—is he really one of the unidentified bodies left on the battlefield or is he actually missing? Amy (and the reader) learns more than she may have expected about the conditions in France during and after the war. Many gruesome details are uncovered, including the activities of Chinese laborers brought to France to do jobs Allied soldiers can't or won't do. All this is background to the strange tale of what happened to her fiancé Edward Haslam in the site known as Two Storm Wood.
Spoiler alert: readers may need a strong stomach as details are revealed about a war than was even worse than you knew.
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Renee T., New Florence Community Library librarian
Two Storm Wood
I found this book to be a very compelling read. Having read many novels based on WWI, I had never read any dealing with the subjects raised in this title. I won't mention those that are spoilers, but I honestly had never thought about who was responsible for retrieving the thousands of soldiers lost in the war. Gray's descriptions of Mackenzie and his men and their heartbreaking job of finding bodies after the war was well written and added much to the atmosphere of the story.
The story itself was quite good, although I was surprised at the amount of freedom Amy managed to have considering the times. I found it hard to believe that she was able to travel to the places she did, alone, in 1919.
Fortunately, Gray's style and story was good enough I could overlook that and read, almost without stopping, to the climactic ending!
I think the moving back and forth between years and characters was handled very well and added suspense to the mysteries of Edward's disappearance and the discovery at Two Storm Wood.
All in all, a great read.
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Joyce W. (Rochester, MN)
Historical Fiction Thriller
This is an amazing story and this author has written other thrillers that I plan to read. This gives a very good description of the WW1 battlefield and what soldiers had to do to survive. Even though the chapters were time dated I did have some trouble jumping from locations. When I finished the book I wanted to start over knowing what I now knew. I would have preferred knowing a little more about Edward's condition at the end of the book. This is a page turner but it takes a lot of concentration to unravel the story.
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Susan R. (Julian, NC)
After WWI
Amy is from a well to do family and believed that she would never find love. When she met Edward at a church, they both became interested in each other and went on many secret dates before he enlisted in the army. Their dates had to be secret because her parents would never approve of someone in a lower class. When she received notification that he was missing in action, presumed dead, Amy decided to go to France to find him or find his body to bring home for burial. She didn't know what to expect when she arrived in France and went to the battlefields where soldiers were working to identify the dead with many of the unknowns being buried in mass graves. She encountered barbed wire, putrid water, and rat-infested tunnels everywhere she searched. Would she ever find Edwards body or was there a chance that he was still alive?
The author did considerable research to write this book about the unknown soldiers left in France and Belgium. It's a dark book filled with grief. Parts of it were difficult to read but weren't there for shock value but were based on information from the war. Amy is well written character and what she went through to find Edward's body was horrific. Not only was she told over and over that a woman shouldn't be in that area but her determination and tenaciousness helped her through the worst times. Most women in this era would never have gone to some of the places that she went looking for information. Actually most women would have never gone at all.
This dark novel is about solders who have given their all. It's beautifully written about an often ignored time in history. Thanks to the author's research, this book gives the reader more information about WWI and the after effects - including PTSD, drug usage, shell shock and horrible injuries.
Several years ago, I visited a World War I cemetery in Belgium Military cemeteries are always sad but this cemetery was even worse. Many of the crosses had no name on them and it was depressing that so many soldiers were lost in WWI that went unnamed and uncelebrated.
Thanks to BookBrowse for a copy of this book to read and review.
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Ellie B. (Mount Airy, MD)
World War 1 love story
I loved the basic story line, it showed lots of potential, however, the descriptions of gore and death took over to the extent that the story line got lost. I found the ending of the book to be very confusing.
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Janice W. (Chicago, IL)
Two Storm Wood
This is a book in search of a genre ... is it a historical romance; historical fiction or a mystery? Beats me. It was a chore to read and left me impressed with the author's foray into history but unimpressed with the book.
The premise has a girl of 18 trooping through the battlefields in France. Somehow she is allowed by a retreating army to crawl through battlefields still laden with bodies and armaments to locate her boyfriend who has been declared missing in action. The whole of the rest of the novel has her meeting other military people who may or may not help her. The novel could be shortened considerably by chopping out 100 or so pages which waste time and reading the first 100 pages and the last 30.
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