Rating: 
Summary: One very fine first novel!
Review: While Jonathan Hull's writing is not at the same inspired level as Mark Helprin's (whose is?), the form of his novel owes a great deal to MEMOIR FROM ANTPROOF CASE and SOLDIER IN THE GREAT WAR. At times, the resemblance was uncanny.LOSING JULIA might not make my year end top ten. Or even my top twenty. It's a bit too long and often redundant. What it was like, for me, was spending a langorous few days with a good and interesting man, Patrick Delaney, who told me all about his life, his war experiences, what it's like to face slow death a second time in a nursing home, to hear his thoughts on just about everything from children, to love as a changing force, to art and its meanings. He's a most interesting companion, this Patrick, rueful, introspective and incisive, who I'll not soon forget. Nice stuff. Very nice indeed.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful story!
Review: I had a hard time reading & finishing this novel. And believe me, I am very interested in history; the Great War, and love stories...but this book just seemed false from the get-go. The characters never came alive; they continued to be "novel" versions of true-life people. Especially false was the depiction of Patrick as an old man; especially the scene on the airplane back to France & his conversations with the young lawyer. Old people just don't talk that much in real life, not like Patrick did; they don't remember their struggles so keenly! Something else false was Patrick's brief fixations on various women throughout the novel. That's a young man's POV; it especially didn't ring true as an 81 year old man dying of cancer. Fight against the dying of the light, for sure, but...well, in a novel, try to keep it real. An old man who's dying is concerned about keeping his dignity, not keeping up elaborate flirtations with his nurse. This reader could tell the author was TRYING to write movingly, and to make you feel for these people, but it just didn't work because the characters' whole situation; their lives, etc., their choices, their feelings as *real* persons, seemed so UNreal. It was always obvious that the author did alot of research about the Great War, and old age, but research alone doesn't bring reality to this novel. There are varied passages of beauty in the book, which gives it my 3-star rating, but the story as a whole never adds up to to the creation of living, breathing characters who remain in your memory.
Rating:
Summary: Truly Beautiful
Review: Jonathan Hull's novel Losing Julia was a pleasure to read. The main character, Patrick Delaney is an 81 year old WWI veteran who begins by reminiscing about his life. The reader is treated to beautiful prose and the haunting and provactive questions Patrick asks himself. "Is it better to have loved and lost or never to have loved at all?" "Is it better to have loved well for a short time or to let love grow and mature beyond that perfect phase of utter bliss?" These themes echo throughout the book as Patrick shares his memories from the war which are written with stunning insight and emotion laden detail by Hull. I was lost in the descriptions of the battles and the terrible killing of the war. That something so horrific could take place in our time is always hard to read about. Yet the irony is that it was an event that made Patrick feel the most alive and at the same time killed him inside. Patrick's relationships with his best friend Daniel, his lover Julia, his wife, his children and his friends from the nursing home are all bittersweet and well developed. This story is a composite of one mans life, the choices he made, and the outcomes from those choices. It couldn't be told in a more compelling and beautiful way. A great novel.
Rating:
Summary: Splendid, affecting story...I loved it!
Review: Jonathan Hull's beautifully crafted novel about love and war is superb. The story is told through Patrick Delany's eyes as a 19-year-old foot soldier in the trenches of WWI, as a 29-year-old WWI veteran looking for answers to the never-ending questions of life, and as an 81-year-old great-grandfather in a nursing home. Hull does a wonderful job weaving the narrative through the different phases of Patrick's life; he understands and knows the characters of Patrick, Daniel, and Julia the way any writer should---like he/she knows himself/herself. There are no surprises or unusual twists...the reader knows that Daniel dies, but the manner of his death is still shocking. I literally gasped and had to close the book to adjust to the vivid scene that Hull described. In our quest to honor the veterans of WWII, I think Americans may have forgotten the greater horrors (if possible) of WWI. And it comes as no surprise that Patrick loses Julia, Daniel's lover. But the manner in which the characters get from Point A to Point B and the choices each character makes makes this is one of the best crafted novels to be published in the last five years. It takes a lot of skill to interweave such three timeframes so that the reader is neither lost nor bored. It would have been easy for Hull to descend into the ghastly and ubiquous, but his ability to tell the tale rises well above the ordinary. I plan to use this novel in my Basic Fiction Writing classes as illustrations of the amount and type of descrption, character development and plotting. There is not an unnecessary word or scene in this entire novel. It's a page-turner that will live in my heart for many, many years.
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