Lovely War by Julie Berry

This book was set not in WWII, like every historical fiction novel ever these days, but during WWI. It had an interesting frame story with Aphrodite and Ares explaining why love and war are always drawn to each other, which helped to set off the actual novel, which was the romance of two separate couples who met and fell and love during the war, despite the trauma, injuries, and misfortunes they all met with. I really liked all of the main characters: Hazel and James, and Aubrey and Collette. They were all cute and fun to read, if maybe a little too sappy and desperately in love to be 100% relatable to logical old me. I thought the storyline of Aubrey, the Black Harlem jazz musician serving in Europe during the war, and all the details about what it was like serving as a Black serviceman during WWI and about jazz and ragtime music at that time, was fantastic. I was maybe a little skeptical that he would have been treated as well as he was in Europe at this time--although maybe it's true that they weren't as racist there as they were in America at this time--and that his relationship with a white woman would have been okay. I was also not altogether sold on the frame story with Aphrodite and Ares. The dialogue there was really pretty awkward and it never really reached its full potential for me. But it was altogether a beautiful book, and I was so happy when the two couples got the happy endings they deserved.