Quite an alluring book jacket cover eh? I had not read author Robert Olmstead before but I was intrigued that “The Coldest Night” was a love story set in the 1950s at the backdrop of the Korean War. What could be more tragic than intense young love and war? And on the 60th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean conflict, I was curious to know more and pay tribute to the Vets who fought to keep the peninsula free. “The Coldest Night” looked like a good read, so I was game.
The story is broken into three parts. The first part introduces a boy named Henry Childs, 17, who has been raised by his single mother in the hills of West Virginia on not a lot of money. He starts working at a ranch caring for horses in his spare time when he falls for a judge’s daughter named Mercy who takes riding lessons there. They end up falling passionately in love and decide to run away to New Orleans in a state of young bliss, that is until Mercy’s father and brother track her down and force them to part ways, letting Henry know he’s not on par with their kind of people.
Devastated to lose Mercy, Henry joins the Marines (in the second part of the novel) and is sent to Korea in time to fight in the brutal battle of the Chosin Reservoir. Here he experiences war atrocities and suffering that are unimaginable. His dreams of Mercy and their times together seem to pull him through in the darkest of these times.
In the final part, Henry slowly makes his way back home, though he’s changed and literally scarred by the war. He can’t seem to forget the horrendous things he’s seen and experienced in Korea, and is also shattered by his mother’s passing while there. Will he reconnect with Mercy, you wonder, or will both be too changed to be together now? What has happened to her in the meanwhile? These are questions mostly resolved in the novel’s final pages.
It may seem a straightforward love/war story with a familiar premise yet the writing in “The Coldest Night” is quite beautiful, notably the descriptions and the coming of age of the boy Henry, who’s quite sensitive to the world and his first love. I especially thought the author, Robert Olmstead, wrote the war scenes amazingly well, and the falling in love parts aren’t too shabby either. His descriptions of the Korean battles really blew me away, and were more effective to me than another war novel I read recently called “The Yellow Birds,” which I know is about a different war but on the whole didn’t grasp me like this one did. Olmstead has a beautiful command of words, which makes “The Coldest Night” a stark but moving book that’ll simmer through you long after the pages float by.
What about you, have you read this novel? What did you think? And what are the best war stories you’ve ever come across?
I haven’t read this but it sure sounds good.