Birdsong

Product Information

This story is a beautiful portrait of intergenerational friendship, community, art, nature, home, and grief. The illustrations are somehow, impossibly, more beautiful than the story. I'm a big fan of Julie Flett, but she has outdone herself here. Set before and during the Great War, Birdsong tells the story of Stephen, starting in pre-war France and taking us right through the war and through a terrible period of history. I learned so much from this book and I really enjoyed the story of the tunnellers, the descriptions of how both sides dug tunnels underground and lay mines under enemy lines was something that I had not been aware of and did some research on since. A bestselling Australian writer's American debut and a heart-wrenching novel of World War I, painting a portrait of the changing role of women in medicine and the powerful legacy of love.

Faulks' writing is truly outstanding, the fear and hopelessness felt by the men is made vivid and terrifyingly portrayed. Julie Flett is a Cree-Metis author, illustrator, and artist. She has received many awards including the 2017 Governor General's Award for Children's Literature for her work on When We Were Alone by David Robertson (High Water Press), the 2016 American Indian Library Association Award for Best Picture Book for Little You by Richard Van Camp (Orca Books), and she is the three-time recipient of the Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Award for Owls See Clearly at Night; A Michif Alphabet, by Julie Flett, Dolphin SOS, by Roy Miki and Slavia Miki (Tradewind Books), and My Heart Fills with Happiness, by Monique Gray Smith (Orca Books). Francoise: “I was sent to Jeanne from Germany, where I had been living, because my real mother had died. She died of flu.” Françoise – Elizabeth's mother, the biological daughter of Stephen and Isabelle who was raised by her father and aunt Jeanne. Escaped from extermination, Stephen feared nothing any more. In the existence he had rejoined, so strange and so removed from what seemed natural, there was only violent death or life to choose between; finer distinctions, such as love, preference or kindness, were redundant.”

Book Summary

The novel has been favourably compared to other World War I and II novels, including All Quiet on the Western Front, The Young Lions and War and Remembrance. [19] Gorra described the novel as even more original than Barker's The Ghost Road and the rest of her Regeneration Trilogy. [9] Kate Saunders, reviewing Birdsong for The Sunday Times, praised the novel and described it as "without the political cynicism that colours more modern treatments of this catastrophe". [17] Reviewers have also compared the novel to other literary works; for example, for one critic, the lead up to the Somme was as persuasive as the "scene in Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt", while the novelist Suzanne Ruta writes that Faulks creates characters with a similar depth to those in Thomas Hardy novels. [17] Adaptations [ edit ] This is a touching story about intergenerational friendship. The addition of some Cree words makes this a really interesting story. The illustrations are beautiful, lovely colours and seasonal scenes. However, the crowning achievement of Birdsong is its unflinching depiction of war. The earsplitting cacophony of the artillery, the claustrophobia of the tunnels, the never-ending mud, the smell of sweat and shit, the horror of seeing a head explode in front of your eyes. The heartbreaking letters sent home from the Somme, its writers knowing that they were almost certainly going to die in the coming hours. The bodies in pieces, pale and rotting in no man's land. The senseless brutality of it all, summed up by a roll call after the battle, ringing with unanswered names: "Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers' shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference."

If I am fighting on behalf of anyone, I think it is for those who have died. Not for the living at home. For the dead, over here." Narration is far more successful when characters voice it, especially in the bedroom scene between Stephen and Isabelle, in which they describe the physical act of passion in turn, and also in the final scenes between Stephen and a Jewish German soldier which brim with pain and poignancy. Katherena and Agnes share the same passions for arts and crafts, birds, and nature. But as the seasons change, can Katherna navigate the failing health of her new friend? Elizabeth Benson – Granddaughter of Stephen Wraysford. Elizabeth has a job in company which manufactures garments. She wants to find out more about World War I and her grandfather's actions. She does this by phoning elderly servicemen, visiting war memorials and translating Stephen's diary. With Birdsong Faulks has created a mesmerizing story of love and war . . . This book is so powerful that as I finished it I turned to the front to start again.A Farewell to Arms and as sensuous as The English Patient. Crafted from the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, a mainstream movie like manipulation of the reader to underline the little regard for life that war has, where key supporting characters' deaths are almost just footnotes, but a footnote with a sniper's bullet or machine gun fire.

Bloomsbury Publishing". Bloomsbury.com. Archived from the original on 15 January 2008 . Retrieved 12 December 2010.The illustrations here are lovely, and nicely portray the seasons. If you're already a fan of Flett's style, you'll find plenty to like here.