Ellis Rosales
11-02-2024
Not a love story, but a story about love
‘Embroidering in the dark’ is a novella dealing with the extremes of life with perceptive insight. Not a love story, but a story about love, life, about what keeps us going, and the atrocities of war. It conveys the inconceivable horrors lived by those witnessing humanity at its worst, without the need to describe all in gruesome detail to the reader.
From the first page, you are transported back in time to an era of a slower pace and a way of life vastly different from our own. This is where we meet the central character, Alistair MacEwan, a Scottish surgeon working in a French field hospital during the first world war. (Imagine waiting weeks or months for news; for a letter from loved ones, and sometimes years, to find out what happened.)
But it is a harrowing experience for those left at home as well, and the ones picking up the pieces. Because the experiences of war do not end just because the war does. It changes everything it touches, and that is all of us, the land included, for generations. I loved the compassion showed our sensitive surgeon, we should all be so fortunate.
I would recommend it to anyone who has family members who went to war and came back broken. (I mean, how could you not?)
This beautiful story will live on in my heart for a long time for all the right reasons. The only complaint I have is it was too short!
03-02-2024
Lijkt erop alsof er te weinig woorden waren om het kleine boekje te vullen. Geregeld dat er in 1 lange zin 2 maal hetzelfde stond met exact dezelfde betekenis. Geen aanrader.
