Two votes. Five written responses. That is the arithmetic on this audiobook page, and the two numbers cannot both be describing the same set of readers. The badge reads 4.5 out of five, which from exactly two whole-star votes means they total nine of a possible ten, one five and one four with no ambiguity about it. Meanwhile five people have written paragraphs underneath, from three countries and across four years. Julie Berry's novel runs 12 hours and 57 minutes here, read by Jayne Entwistle for Listening Library.
The Verdict, Briefly
Aphrodite is the narrator, and everything the book does well or badly follows from that decision. Caught by Hephaestus with Ares, she has to tell a story proving that love outlasts war or face judgment on Mount Olympus, and the four mortal lives she chooses become the novel. One reader summarizes the setup in almost those exact terms and calls the result "such an interesting unique story"; another loved "how the story was told from the perspective of Aphrodite and Hades." The gods are not decoration here, they are the frame and the commentary.
Hazel, James, Aubrey and Colette are the mortals: a classical pianist from London, a British would-be architect turned soldier, a Harlem-born ragtime genius in the U.S. Army, and a Belgian orphan with a gorgeous voice and a devastating past. Four lives, two wars, and a structure that has to keep all of them moving. One response singles out "the epistolary elements" as a particular pleasure, which suggests the novel varies its delivery rather than running four parallel third-person threads for thirteen hours. The publisher's own summary lists prejudice alongside passion among the book's subjects, and the Harlem musician's thread through the U.S. Army is where that promise has to be kept or broken.
Five people wrote about this book and the counter credits two of them. That gap is the single most misleading item in view, because a browser reading 4.5 from two votes will assume almost nobody has engaged with the title, while the column underneath holds detailed paragraphs going back to 2020. Whatever produced the mismatch, the practical advice is to ignore the vote count entirely and read the responses, which carry far more information than the badge does.
Why Lovely War Works as an Audiobook
Jayne Entwistle is credited alone, and the assignment is the interesting part: a goddess narrating in the first person, a London concert pianist, a British soldier, an American musician from Harlem and a Belgian orphan, plus at least one other Olympian who takes over the telling at points according to one reader. That is a wide range of registers and origins for a single voice to hold across nearly thirteen hours, and it is the kind of book where casting one reader rather than a full company is a deliberate choice about unity.
Julie Berry's reputation for this sort of layering is not invented by the marketing: readers describe a mix of genres, historical fiction and a WWI setting with mythology, as "so perfectly blended," and the one four-star response spends its length explaining the machinery rather than complaining about it. What the responses also make clear is that this is a divisive book. The most enthusiastic entry opens by reporting two extremes in how people felt about it, "either they hated it or they loved it," and describes going in braced for the odds of a middle ground being slim.
Seven starred reviews, an indie bestseller listing, a Washington Post line about how none of the obvious adjectives "quite conveys the emotional width and depth of Julie Berry's brilliant novel," plus praise from Bookpage and the New York Times. The description spends its final third on the book's reception rather than its contents, which is usually a warning sign and here is at least partly earned. One reader states outright that they arrived because someone compared it to Divine Rivals, so the comparison in the first line of the copy demonstrably worked.
Points to Consider
Three entries in this column break off in mid-sentence, and they break at the worst possible places. The five-star entry cuts off exactly as it begins to explain that "The method of storytelling is a little different with this one," which is the sentence a hesitant buyer most needs. The four-star entry breaks off midway through describing the Harlem musician. What survives on the page is enthusiasm without its reasoning, and that is a poor basis for a thirteen-hour decision.
Between them the five responses come from the United States, Canada and Spain, and span 2020 to 2023. The Spanish entry is six words long, written in Portuguese, and concerns the delivery rather than the book, yet it carries a four-star grade displayed exactly like the detailed paragraphs above it. Where a column is this thin, a note about a parcel occupies the same space as a page of analysis.
Nothing on the page prepares a listener for how much mythology they are signing up for. The description mentions gods holding the fates of four mortals and then moves to pull quotes; in practice the Olympians narrate, interrupt and argue, and that is precisely the element the divided readership divides over. The copy's line about World Wars I and II also undersells how much of the actual story sits in the first of them, at least according to the reader who describes a WWI setting throughout.
Should You Listen to Lovely War?
Readers who liked the idea of a war story told by the goddess of love, and who want their historical fiction unashamedly romantic, will get exactly what the frame promises. It works for teenagers and for adults reading YA on purpose, for anyone drawn in by the comparison the copy leads with, and for listeners who like their novels braided rather than linear. One reader plans to hand it to their children as teens, which is a fair measure of how it lands. Anyone who finished Divine Rivals and wants the same blend of myth and wartime letters has the shortest path to it here.
It will frustrate anyone who wants the war rendered straight, without divine commentary softening the edges, and anyone who reads historical fiction for period accuracy above all. A thirteen-hour novel that splits its audience this cleanly is worth sampling rather than gambling on. Aphrodite gets the last word inside the book; on this page, a six-word note about a parcel does.
