Book Review: Hallowed Ground by Rebecca Yarros

Hallowed Ground by Rebecca Yarros

Pages: 410
Publish date: 25 January 2016
Publisher: Entangled: Embrace
ISBN: 1633755428
Purchase: Book Depository– Amazon UK – Amazon US – Amazon AU

There are some debts you can’t repay.

Josh Walker is loyal, reckless, and every girl’s dream. But he only has eyes for December Howard, the girl he’s craved since his high school hockey days. Together they have survived grief, the military, distance, and time as they’ve fought for stolen weekends between his post at Ft. Rucker and her college at Vanderbilt. Now that Josh is a medevac pilot and Ember is headed toward graduation, they’re moving on—and in—together.

Ember never wanted the Army life, but loving Josh means accepting whatever the army dictates—even when that means saying goodbye as Josh heads to Afghanistan, a country that nearly killed him once before and that took her father. But filling their last days together with love, passion, and plans for their future doesn’t temper Ember’s fear, and if there’s one thing she’s learned from her father’s death, it’s that there are some obstacles even love can’t conquer.

Flight school is over.
This is war.

Hallowed Ground:

I wasn’t prepared for Hallowed Ground by Rebecca Yarros, not at all. If you are going to start reading it, them please do yourself a favour and have a box of tissues nearby. This will contain spoilers from all the previous books.

Hallowed Ground is book 4 in The Fight and Glory series and a sequel to book 1 – Full Measures. It’s set 2 years after the events of the first book and follows protagonists, December (Ember) and Josh as they set into life of living together, except now he is expected to go back to where he was nearly killed before and the place that took her father’s life – Afghanistan.

I love and hate this book. I loved it because the series finished with something really beautiful and we got to see the characters that we have come to previously love. However this book torn me to shreds.

I loved seeing Ember and Josh again, it had been quite a while since we had seen them, sure they came up in parts of the other books, but we didn’t see them, and it was nice to see.

I loved Ember as a character, her character arc is quite amazing from the first book. She has grown so much from the first time we have seen her. Throughout Hallowed Ground all I wanted to do is hug her. Ember broke me. She had been through so much before and in this book, she is ripped apart.

“I don’t care how you come home. I don’t care what parts of you are broken, or bleeding, or… anything, just as long as you come home. As long as your heart is beating, I will want you, do you understand me? I don’t care what happens there as long as you come home.”

Josh, my love for Josh is unexplainable, but gosh did I want to slap him around a bit. I understand most of the things he did and that I am not even fussed about, however the things that happened with Ember towards the end of the book. It’s like Josh she loves you, why are you doing this to her and yourself.

They have survived through so much and I wasn’t sure they were going to survive this novel, especially with Josh being back in Afghanistan.

It was really great to see the military aspect of Hallowed Ground. We saw it a little in the last novel, however it wasn’t that prominent, with this novel being half in Josh point of view it made sense. I love military planes, there is something about there. Here is Victoria, where I live we have a thing called the Airshow every 2 years, where military planes and others come and put of a show. I love the feeling of hornets flying by. So I truly enjoyed seeing the military aspect.

One thing that annoyed me with Hallowed Ground was the consent separation between Ember and Josh, not the physical separation, but the emotional and it killed me. I just wanted everything to be okay, and it wasn’t, not in the slightest.

Hallowed Ground is emotionally draining. I cried for most of this book, bad things kept happening, all I wanted was for it to be over. Not because it was horrifying, because it hurt my heart.

“I cannot imagine a future where you’re not mine, because I’m yours in every sense of the word.”

Nevertheless, Hallowed Ground is probably my favourite of all 4 books. It had so much and more. There is a chance that I won’t read the middle two books again, for something in this book will make it impossible.

Although, many sad and emotionally heartbreaking things happened in Hallowed Ground there was so many beautiful moments that were heart lifting. The epilogue was just beautiful and I smiled the whole time reading it.

Overall, Hallowed Ground was a beautiful read that intertwined, family both by blood and friendship. Loss that can bring people closer together or tear some apart. About doing what is right for you and the ones that you love and forgiveness and what it truly means to forgive not only others but yourself.