Rating: 
Summary: a great book!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: i cannot believe i had never heard of this book. i was browsing through amazon, saw it, saw the reviews, and thought, it can't be that bad. little did i know that it was going to be one of the best books i have ever read. light and whimsical, yet at the same time deeply tragic, yet at the same time full of hope and life, i really loved this book! it is one of those plots where random events are soon seen to be not so random, you soon realize that everything happening is important, and then at the end you say "ohhh now i get it" and realize that the author is a genius for being able to construct such a great plot. if all the book had going for it was plot then it would still be a classic but the characters are fantastic. everyone is loveable, i even loved the "bad guys." this book is well worth its price and after reading it you to will wonder why you have never heard of this book.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: The most wonderful and amusing book I have read in a long time. I am still smiling at the thought of what i have just read and that is what drives me to write my first on-line review ever. This is a book that we should all aspire to write because it teaches us what we can do, or dream, despite our 'flaws'. Indeed, a small flaw in our character can be a wonderful thing if we would just stop dwelling on it and get on with the matter at hand.That said, I am mortified that the second book is out of print and that the series will not be completed. If anybody has ever wept at the burning of a book u will appreciate my sense of loss. We are being robbed of a truely great voice! Mr Hughart, please continue!
Rating:
Summary: A charming "chinese" fantasy
Review: I had a copy of this book when I was a teenager, and I loved it. Unfortunately, it got lost during a move. I remembered it as being charmingly written, well researched, and one of the funniest things I'd ever read. Having got another copy 10 years later, I was pleased to see that I wasn't wrong. A shame the others are out of print, but hopefully I'll manage to get copies anyway!
Rating:
Summary: How Many Copies?
Review: I must have purchased 5 copies of this book over the past 15 years. I keep loaning it out to friends and losing track of who has my copy so I have to buy a new one when I want to re-read the book. It's absolutely wonderful from beginning to end. Filled with adventurous tales and fascinating characters, Bridge of Birds is a thrilling trip across a mythical China. Bridge of Birds would make a great movie!
Rating:
Summary: Highly entertaining!
Review: I absolutely loved this book. Characters made lovable in their imperfection, outrageous plot twists that the reader TOTALLY buys into, a riveting story...It's perfect. Where is Mr. Hughart now?? I would love to read more.
Rating:
Summary: Charming, amusing, moving, bloody, beautiful
Review: This is a very fine novel, charming, amusing, moving, often strikingly beautiful, often rather horrifyingly bloody. The story is a fantasy set in Ancient China, at a time roughly corresponding to the 7th century AD, best I can tell. The narrator is Lu Yu (not to be confused with the author of The Classic of Tea), who is usually called Number Ten Ox. The story opens with the yearly silkworm spinning at Number Ten Ox' home village: but instead of the bounteous harvest of silk the villagers expect, all the silkworms have died: much worse, soon the children of the village are afflicted with a terrible plague. The locals can do nothing for the children, so they send Number Ten Ox to Peking to find an expert. But they have miscalculated the expense of expert help, and the only expert they can afford is Li Kao, Master Li, who has a slight flaw in his character.Master Li and Number Ten Ox are soon off on a series of searches, from end to end of China, trying to find the Great Root of Power, which may be the key to a cure for the children. Along the way they encounter gods and goddesses, monsters and ghosts, wise men and terrible tyrants. At first the book seems to be a fairly unstructured, though continually entertaining, collection of escapades. However, an underlying structure emerges, in the form of an old legend, and a children's rhyme and game. By the end, Master Li and Number Ten Ox find that much more is at stake than the fate of the children of the village. In particular, Number Ten Ox' attitude is well- depicted: throughout his adventures, he thinks always of the children, in a true-feeling and very affecting way. The resolution to the story is very satisfying, and also beautifully depicted. Puzzles are solved, emotional knots untangled, ghosts set free, tyrants deposed, and all is neatly unified. At the simplest level the book is an always amusing, often very funny, light fantasy: at another level it achieves real emotional power. It is also an astonishingly bloody book, but somehow we care and even mourn for the many victims even while the tone remains light. In passages the prose achieves real beauty, in particular a prayer which Hughart adapted from a Chinese source, and also the description of the bridge of birds. I recommend this lovely fantasy very highly.
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Summary: The best book ... no matter what the French think!
Review: I read Jean-Francois Virey's trashing of this book and was completely dumbfounded. Did he and I read the same book? I have read this book several times and have never failed to be amused, entertained and uplifted. Hughart does what all authors wish they could do....they make their readers want more. Number Ten Ox and Master Li (...there's a slight flaw in my character) are some of my favorite fictional characters. Virey needs to lighten up and recognize that he's only one in almost 100 readers to weigh in on the negative. Hughart rules!
Rating: 
Summary: Cartoonish, inauthentic, and poorly written
Review: Given five stars by seventy eight out of seventy nine Amazon reviewers, recommended in numerous lists of best fantasy books, praised by Anne McCaffrey as a flawless novel, *Bridge of Birds* seemed to have been written especially for me, a lifelong reader of fantasy and lover of Ancient China. But I hated it so much I almost threw it into the trash can. *Bridge of Birds* is billed as "a lyrical fantasy novel", but it is nothing of the sort. To paraphrase a famous review of Louis Cha's much superior *The Deer and the Cauldron*, *Bridge of Birds* is "Ancient China meets Monty Python", only Monty Python makes me laugh. It is to *The Monkey King* what *The Life of Brian* is to the Gospels. So anyone looking for the beauty, complexity and refinement of Ancient Zhong Guo will be disappointed; Hughart laughs at everything, including mutilation and rape: "Lady Wu, whose beauty was said to rival that of the semilegendary Queen Feiyen, was carried into the bushes by a creature who had no ears or nose, and whose eyes were as yellow as his teeth. We all have our little weaknesses, but I must question the judgment of Cut-Off-Their-Balls Wang when he abandoned his fellow hooded monks to disport in the bushes with Lady Wu. He missed a great deal of excitement." But the primary target of Hughart's "humour" is China herself, of which he seems to have a rather patronizing and derogatory opinion, best summarized by one of his characters, Master Li: "Take a large bowl. Fill it with equal measures of fact, fantasy, history, mythology, science, superstition, logic and lunacy. Darken the mixture with bitter tears, brighten it with howls of laughter, toss in three thousand years of civilization, bellow *kan pei* - which means 'dry cup'- and drink the dregs... You will be Chinese." Even more irritating is the fact that the novel, which is supposed to be written by the protagonist, Number Ten Ox, makes no effort at capturing the style or outlook of the era. Sometimes, Hughart even forgets his narrator is a Chinese of the Tang Dynasty, and has him write such anachronistic comments as: "The abbot was dancing a jig while he bellowed, 'Namo Kuanshiyin Boddhisattva Mahasattva', which is how good Buddhists say 'hallelujah'." As for the style, it is simply atrociously amateurish. Hughart's idea of speeding up the pace is to write a series of independent clauses connected by a series of and's. His similes are all cliches: from afar, people look like ants; and clouds resemble sails speeding across the sky. Fat people invariably are "enormously big". And to describe a gargantuan meal, Hughart finds nothing more digestible than to pile up thirteen subordinate clauses introduced by the phrase "which was followed by". *Bridge of Birds* is a typical product of modern culture: a hip, glib and totally inconsequential novel, designed to entertain but utterly devoid of any deeper meaning of philosophical import, and written in a lazy, unpolished style without the slightest trace of poetry or genuine love of anything. I am even almost certain that if Hughart set his book in a "China that never was", it was merely to save himself the effort of historical research. Ayn Rand once said that "the best drawn character in anyone's writing is the author himself" (*The Art of Fiction, p120). Well, I guess I don't have much sympathy for the novel's best drawn character.
Rating:
Summary: Delightfully amusing!
Review: Bridge of Birds is an epic of outrageous proportion but Hughart writes with such a light and airy touch that you cannot help but laugh aloud at the absurd occurrences. The book is very funny, right down to the names of the characters, but the plot still captivates at a much deeper level than you would expect. It is not as simple and straightforward as you might believe upon reading the first few chapters (the tale takes many twists and becomes quite entangled as the book progresses). Underneath the humor, there is also a darker tale whose horror blends with the laughter to create an interesting mood as you read the book. The book centers around many themes of Chinese mythology and it is clear that Hughart had a deep fascination with it. Bridge of Birds is one of the funniest books I have ever read, but its worth does not lie wholly in its comic effect and I will no doubt read it again sometime.
Rating:
Summary: A delightful fantasy, refreshing and fun
Review: Bridge of Birds begins as a simple tale of a young man known as Number Ten Ox who solicits the help of the aged Master Li to save the children of his village from a deadly poison. Together they journey across China in search of a legendary ginseng root, meanwhile becoming entangled in a grander quest involving the gods themselves. This fabled China of Barry Hughart's imagination is a wonderful setting for a story filled with adventure and wonder. Throughout, Number Ten Ox plays the Watson to Master Li's Sherlock Holmes, but the mystery they tackle involves a murderous tyrant, forlorn ghosts, a ruined city, a deadly labyrinth, and an ancient legend. At times a lighthearted fairy tale (with a humorously drawn cast of supporting characters) and at other times a bit bloody, Bridge of Birds is in all ways a beautiful story and well worth reading.
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