Rating: 
Summary: Unforgettable
Review: This is easily one of the best books I've read. First attracted to it by the title, then the cover picture, in the bookstore where I work part-time, never in my wildest imagaination did I know what I was in for when I started reading it.
As a war book it is amazing in describing what life was like in the trenches during WWI. The term "No Man's Land" now has new meaning for me. After reading this book, as a mother, I can't imagine any mother ever wanting their sons, or daughters, to go off to war and serve as cannon fodder. The cheapness of human life was revealed to me, as thousands died to gain a few inches of groumd, only to lose it. Interspersed through the book Hull included diary entries from real soldiers that serve as a grim reminder of what it was really like.
As a love story, which is only a small part of the book, Patrick reflects on choices he's made. A loving father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he realizes early on in his marriage that he made the wrong choice, but when faced with the possiblity of having Julia as his own, his courage falters.
Though he had a good life and a successful one, looking back he can see the mistakes, the lost opportunities. Told with humor, his life in the retirement home is both funny and heartbreaking as he faces his impending death from stomach cancer.
Hull makes the characters seem larger than life and so real it isn't hard to find yourself mourning for young Daniel, whose life was full of such promise. His death will stay with me for a long time. Please take the time to read this book. You won't be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful
Review: Patrick Delaney is an unlikely hero. He finds himself at 81 contemplating his past and suffering the indignities of the present. WWI has become as fresh in his mind as if it happened yesterday. Patrick revisits his past; mourning his friend Daniel and his lost love Julia.Set in three time frames this book reaches the heart of what it is like to have loved and lost and to wonder about the might have been. You can't help but shed a tear for Patrick and Julia. Their chance meeting 10 years after the Great War ended altered the course of both their lives leaving Patrick to regret the choices he made 60 years later. This is also a story of triumph. Triumph of spirit and the will to chose despite impending death. I can't help but feel anyone reading this book will be touched by the beautiful story of Patrick and Julia. I look forward to reading more by Jonathan Hull.
Rating:
Summary: Splendid, affecting story...I loved it!
Review: I have just finished "Losing Julia," and can do nothing more than highly recommend it. I am truly saddened to leave Patrick Delaney, the 81-year-old main character and World War I veteran whose life Jonathan Hull so beautifully crafts in this lovely novel. The author has done a transcendent job in this book of creating genuine and unique characters whom we can see and feel and imagine, coupled with the gripping world history that had such a crushing, but not fatal, impact on all of their lives. Until now, I had very little knowledge about World War I, as I am a baby boomer born in 1948. With this wonderful read, however, I have come to know what this, and every, war symbolizes for all of the souls who are touched by it. Patrick Delaney, Julia, Daniel and all of the others who grace this story are beautifully delineated for us, giving us a tale of historical fiction in which there is not one false note. Thank you, Jonathan Hull, for your beautiful writing, for your luster in creating flawed, real and consequently, luminescent characters for us to experience...and for this gripping tale of love, loss and the redemptive power of love, at whatever cost. I will watch with great interest for your novelistic efforts in the future! If you love history mixed with beautifully drawn fictional characters who live it and report honestly what it has done to their lives, this is a must-read for you! A beautiful reading experience...
Rating:
Summary: Love Is A Many Splendid Thing!
Review: Have you ever wondered what it must feel like to be dying and to know it? Especially if you've lived a rich and full life and you know that your time is near. Oh, you don't have any particular disease or malady. You are simply old and it's time. Jonathan Hull has done just that in his novel Losing Julia. It has been said that the unexamined life is not worth living. If that be the case, then certainly Patrick Delaney's life was all those things that indeed make life worth living; and he examined them in a deep and meaningful manner. From the trenches of World War I where the reader truly gets an understanding of the horror and fear and destruction that combat carries, to the warm but often awkward embrace that too many lovers have shared over the ages, to the eyes of an old man in a nursing home, the reader is taken through a tender-hearted story of a life well lived. And its not that there aren't regrets and miscues in the well lived life. There always are. Yet the signifcance of the life well lived is judged, not by what happens to a person, rather how a person reacts to what happens to her or him. Often times the male gender claims not to get into love stories. This one is an excpetion. From the moment you pick up the book and begin to get your bearings in a meaningful story that spans continents and decades, you'll be hooked no mattter your gender. Losing Julia is one of those books that you want to have on hand to read on a cold day when you stay inside under a warm blanket and dip those cheap, hard ginger cookies in a cup of hot chocolate and allow the intellect and emotions to carry you away through pages of a well written story. Truly one of the more satisfying books this reviewer has read in quite a long while.
Rating:
Summary: A Lovely Debut
Review: Jonathan Hull has written a lovely debut novel in Losing Julia. It is difficult to portray strong emotions such as grief, love and intense fear without crossing the line into trite overwrought sentimentality, yet Hull manages to pull it off. Losing Julia is told from the point-of-view of eighty-one year old Patrick Delaney and takes us back through his life as a soldier in the trenches of France in World War I, then ten years later to a chance meeting with his best friend's fiancée, Julia, to the present day. Losing Julia is an elegantly written book about love, the loss of love and the ravages of war on the individual psyche. Although parts of the book can be horrifying, Hull wisely gives us touches of warm-hearted humor as well. The stereotypical crotchety old man, Patrick is, by turns, poetic and sardonic, but he is always lovable. In the hands of a lesser writer, Losing Julia might have easily become melodramatic...the stuff of a television daytime soap opera, but Hull's writing is so good, so elegant, so classy, that most readers will find they can't help but share Patrick's thoughts and want to make them their own. Patrick is certainly no cookie-cutter character. He grows and changes immensely from the time he is a struggling, young poet trying to come to terms with the horrors of war, to the wise, and sometimes witty, older man in the nursing home. He never has all the answers, but he really doesn't feel he needs them. I found Hull, and Patrick, to be so correct about our penchant to let the present slip by when Patrick talks about the tendency to live only in regrets for the past or hopes for the future. Hull's descriptions of the battle scenes in World War I are filled with detail, although some of them do border on the purple. His metaphors tend to be those of a world that is slitting its own wrists and bleeding to death. It's elegant writing, sure, and it it, at times, poetic, but I really doubt that men in battle think that way and this is where I think the book fails a little. This is not a book that describes war in the graphic way that can be found in Stephen Wright's Meditations in Green, nor is it a book that, I think, that will achieve the staying power of Mark Helprin's classic, A Soldier of the Great War. It is, however, a warm and wonderful story of love and friendship, of loss and gain, and, although the ending is a bit unbelievable, the character of Patrick is still so well-drawn that Losing Julia is an enjoyable and very worthwhile novel.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful story!
Review: This story was beautifully told. Very touching and heartfelt. The story of Julia, Daniel, and Patrick was told over 60 years. I could imagine the love, heartache, and pain of these characters.
Rating: 
Summary: 3 stars only from this reader
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: Truely 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: I have just finished "Losing Julia," and can do nothing more than highly recommend it. I am truly saddened to leave Patrick Delaney, the 81-year-old main character and World War I veteran whose life Jonathan Hull so beautifully crafts in this lovely novel. The author has done a transcendent job in this book of creating genuine and unique characters whom we can see and feel and imagine, coupled with the gripping world history that had such a crushing, but not fatal, impact on all of their lives. Until now, I had very little knowledge about World War I, as I am a baby boomer born in 1948. With this wonderful read, however, I have come to know what this, and every, war symbolizes for all of the souls who are touched by it. Patrick Delaney, Julia, Daniel and all of the others who grace this story are beautifully delineated for us, giving us a tale of historical fiction in which there is not one false note. Thank you, Jonathan Hull, for your beautiful writing, for your luster in creating flawed, real and consequently, luminescent characters for us to experience...and for this gripping tale of love, loss and the redemptive power of love, at whatever cost. I will watch with great interest for your novelistic efforts in the future! If you love history mixed with beautifully drawn fictional characters who live it and report honestly what it has done to their lives, this is a must-read for you! A beautiful reading experience...
Rating:
Summary: The plot is familiar, the storytelling unique
Review: Jonathan Hull's "Losing Julia" is a terrific novel. The plot line is familiar--boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl stays lost--but Mr. Hull's way of telling us this tale is powerful and original. The truths told by the protagonist are so real, so right that I was breathless in places and tearful in others. This is a must-read novel for those seeking a bittersweet romance and those who want sad truths told well.
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