Rating: 
Summary: Haunting, mesmerizing, moving ~ Perfection
Review: A book that you will not want to put down.. One of the most beautifully written novels that I have ever had the privilege of reading. The love affair stirs your soul, the description of war will break your heart. This is truly a novel that you will want to read more than once. You will not be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Best book I ever read.
Review: I read the book in 1½ days - couldn't put it down and can't forget it. The love story, the description of life in the trenches and the trauma the soldiers experienced when on leave - all was fantastically described! I urge everyone to read it!
Rating:
Summary: A Poignant Masterpiece
Review: Birdsong will be a book that I will remember forever. This author captures the real-life situations quite well, although it doesn't seem realistic that Isabelle and Stephen would just fall in love out of the blue. However, the grief and torment in the scenes of the war were very well described and very moving.
Rating: 
Summary: Wordy and unconvincing
Review: I read this book expecting a wonderful tale of love and war. The love scenes turned out to be much ado about nothing except over the top arousal..The war scenes were so gory as to leave nothing to the imagination. The book could have been about 200 pages shorter without so many long, vague adjectives and the overuse of the made-up word "normality." There wasn't much of THAT in the book. Why did Isabelle leave Stephen? We'll never know. Why the sudden attack of scruples? Why not tell him the whole story instead of torturing him with Max? We'll never know. If you want to read books of real impact about WW1 read Pat Barker's trilogy!
Rating:
Summary: A perfect beach read!
Review: I had no objection to the novel, other than that it was hailed as an extraordinary work of art. To be fair, the war scenes were some of the best I'd ever read, but the writer spoiled them with his trite and unconvincing portrayal of the affair between Stephen and Isabelle, and by his seeming inability to create a single solid female character.
Rating:
Summary: Turgid, inept, wooden characterisation
Review: If this had been advertised as an airport novel I would not have objected to it so strongly, but I simply feel ripped off. It's hardly a novel, let alone a great work of literature. The characters are half-dimensional and often barely credible, it's badly written, its ovewhelmingly pretentious:one can see the author has a Grand Scheme to write an Epic Sweeping Novel, but he doesn't begin to pull it off. Frankly doesn't rate even one star. I'd rather read a Jeffrey Archer. No, I didn't like it at all.
Rating:
Summary: When's the movie due out?
Review: After the English Patient, Saving Private Ryan and the Thin Red Line one can only wonder when the movie version of Birdsong will be out.This book appeals to the reader on a variety of levels -- one measure of an outstanding novel. Faulks' weave of love and war, his use of symbolism, time shift and narration are masterful. The symbolic "underworld" of the World War I tunnel provided a unique underpinning -- no pun intended -- for the book. This was a deep, well-written novel in more ways than one.
Rating:
Summary: Why isn't this book a movie yet?
Review: It's so difficult to read a book these days without being extremely conscious of 'that man behind the curtain' (as in, "Ignore that man behind the curtain" from 'The Wizard of Oz'). In Birdsong, Sebastian Faulk's presence as creator of what we were allowed to see was almost oppressive. I won't go so far as to say I felt manipulated. After all, the author's job is to show you what he chooses to and only that, but I did tire somewhat of that little voice in my ear saying, a bit too solicitously, 'All right now, let's just take a look over here' when so often I would really like to have taken a look 'over there', so to speak. I think I'd have appreciated the opportunity to ascertain the characters' motives. Isabelle seemed to have no purpose for her actions whatsoever ("I was born for this" is her only thought as she and Steven indulge their adulterous passions (deliciously described, I might add), and her reasons for deserting him after discovering her pregnancy are never really pursued. (I'm reminded of Sally Bowles explanation for her abortion in 'Cabaret'; "Oh, just one of my whims.") But even passion seems merely to be a force, which occasionally (and happily for us)uses the human form, but which itself is subservient to some larger purpose, the final manifestation of which is the gushing blood and pale white skull of an anonymous birth some 70 years later. Lots of fun stuff in this book for a fine freshman 'analyse thematique'. Or, better yet, this would make a great, full-of-mystifying-but-probably-significant, visual-imagery-packed cult film. Anyone who takes a date to see this film is sure to score that night. Good job, Mr. Faulks.
Rating:
Summary: The most exceptional book ever written!
Review: As a passionate reader of too many years to mention, I have had the privilege of reading literally hundreds of great books. 'Birdsong' is, without question, the most extraordinary, almost unimaginably beautiful book published this century. Faulks writes with such exquisite beauty that one is left nothing short of breathless. Never have I been so moved, so deeply and profoundly affected by a novel as I was by this one. 'Birdsong' is the only book I have ever wept over finishing.
Rating:
Summary: WWI's horror and a tragic love affair
Review: Seldom have I read a novel as moving as "Birdsong". Seldom have I felt such pity and admiration for a set of characters. I regret finishing the book, yet this weekend I could not put it down. Like the recent film "Saving Private Ryan", Faulks' descriptions of WWI trench warfare and the horrors thereof depict things that most people don't consider or are not told about. We get the pretty, heroic stories in classroom history books but go lacking in the real, heart-rending facts of warfare that make the freedoms these people died to protect that much more precious. The prose is achingly beautiful and haunting. If you long to get immersed - TOTALLY immersed - in a novel that will remain with you long after you finish the last word of the last page, "Birdsong" is highly recommended. I find myself wanting to start it over again, more slowly this time, and wrap myself in its sadness and lush storytelling once more.
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