Reviews

Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières

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aleahlitt's review

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I really loved this. I feel that this is the way historical fiction should be written. Beautifully done!

This is a very good book. It is dense and long, but worth it. It follows many people from a village in the Ottoman Empire, which becomes Turkey in the book and describes how World War II and the Turkish War for Independence affected the villages that were once inhabited by both Christians and Muslims, who would occasionally intermarry, but were, after the war, made to be only for Muslims as the Christians were deported to Greece and Muslim Greeks were deported to Turkey. It also follows Mustafa Kemal, who became the first president of modern day Turkey. And his life and work for the Turkish National Movement is intertwined in the story.

If you do not know much about this period of time (as I did not), I recommend reading the wikipedia article of Mustafa Kemal just to get some historical bearings.

At the end of the book when they Christians were being deported from Turkey, I was reminded of the current day exodus of Syrians taking boats across the Meditteranean to find respite in Greece and Italy and other parts of Europe. In this story, someone looking back at the deportations says that she doesn't believe it could happen "nowadays" but if we know anything about history, we current humans are not so modern that we won't torture, kill, or destroy other humans because we looked away or were following orders. Everything old is new again, or never was old to start with.

This is a book about war and about the results of war. It does not have happy endings. I am glad to have read it. It reads wonderfully between the voices of the characters.

anouk14's review

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challenging informative sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

stella1una's review

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Brutal treatment of a woman. Might try it again.

mgbussy134's review

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challenging reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

lillyserpent's review

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adventurous challenging emotional funny informative reflective sad tense medium-paced

curlypip's review

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3.0

It’s too hard to review! There’s some beautiful writing, believable characters and plenty of history to learn, but, the scope of the book is so vast that it’s easy to lose the storyline.

The story is told from the point of view of many different characters from a village in Turkey where Christians, Jews and Muslims, Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and others, had lived peacefully for generations. As the region descends into one war after another leading to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Turkey, these characters’ lives are ripped apart, leaving them as powerless as birds without wings.

It’s an epic story; and one that’s especially hard to read knowing what’s happening in the world right now.

The scenes set in the trenches in Gallipoli and the chapters from the point of view of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk were too long for me; and it made me feel like I was reading a history textbook rather than a novel set in the region. Some background was necessary, but not so much. I needed more from the individual characters