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caterinaanna's review against another edition
4.0
It always seems a bit 'off' to say one enjoyed a book that deals with harrowing subjects, so let's say instead that I appreciated this. It was certainly much better than the film, which I saw soon enough after reading to be all too aware of how the story had been adapted and what had been cut, and made me appreciate just how integral the descriptions of places and feelings were to the plot.
I'm not sure I completely followed the machinations in London that led to Charlotte's betrayal, but it did at least provide her with an excuse to go from place to place. Similarly she herself remained something of an enigma to me. Gregory was more solid, his reactions and actions more coherently explained, but it was the setting and all the smaller, credible, unheroic acts of sympathy and resistance and capitulation that made it seem real.
There were a few points where Faulks' prose got in the way, but no-one could claim it's the sort of literary fiction that's all style and no plot. Think it would benefit from a re-read, so maybe, one day ...
I'm not sure I completely followed the machinations in London that led to Charlotte's betrayal, but it did at least provide her with an excuse to go from place to place. Similarly she herself remained something of an enigma to me. Gregory was more solid, his reactions and actions more coherently explained, but it was the setting and all the smaller, credible, unheroic acts of sympathy and resistance and capitulation that made it seem real.
There were a few points where Faulks' prose got in the way, but no-one could claim it's the sort of literary fiction that's all style and no plot. Think it would benefit from a re-read, so maybe, one day ...
rachelp's review against another edition
5.0
This was a wonderful book. Perhaps better than Birdsong, but that may be because I prefer the World War II era to World War I.
librarianonparade's review against another edition
3.0
I had high hopes for this book, because I absolutely loved Birdsong, but I found it left me rather unmoved. It's written in what seems, to me at least, to be a curiously detached style and it didn't seem to really penetrate beneath the surface of the characters. Even amidst the danger of Occupied France, SS officers on trains, children being sent to concentration camps, the collaboration and resistance of the French, I never really cared very much about what happened to the characters. The one part that did affect me, the two young boys being sent to the gas chambers, was less about the specific fate of those two characters and more about the actual fate of the children who really were killed in the Holocaust. So, a disappointment, I would say.
geekmom's review against another edition
2.0
A nice and fairly well written ww2 story completely undone by the tired old trope of "naive young woman is utterly transformed by the power of her love for a man". Yawwwwn.
scientistsinistral's review against another edition
DNF-ing this at 210 pages. This book just isn't doing anything for me and I don't have time for that ish. I'm going to make blackout poetry out of it instead.
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