Customer Reviews

Birds (Penguin Longman Reader Level 2)

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I think the book is well written. There are a lot of tension and the tension is kept throughout the whole book. The situation of Nat and his family is shown well because you just see Nat's point of view and so you know how he sees that crazy situation of having millions of birds attack his family. You can feel the danger of the bird attacks and the fear and the helpness of the whole population.
I think the story isn't very difficult to understand. It's written in an easy English. Alfred Hitchcock took the idea of the birds' attacks from Du Maurier and made a great film out of it. But the story is very different from the book - only the bird's attack ia still the same.

I think the book birds von Daphne du Maurier is a good short novel. It's a little bit short, but that is not really bad. Because of the shortness, the book can't become boring.
I like that the story is mysterious. The attack from the birds is
inexplicable. It's not the usual behaviour of birds. But in spite of them, the story is believable, because the attack is possible. The birds are able to kill a woman or a man. If the animals were worms or something else, then story would be unbelievable and stupid.
Another thing I like is the relation from the birds and the nature. The birds stand in this book for all nature disaster. It's just an other representation. I think it's a ingenious representaion.
The book is timeless. Daphne du Maurier wrote this book brief after the second world war. It also have a relation to the war. And today the book get read again and again. In some years the book will probably be as popular as now.

I absolutely love the story "The Birds" and was so excited when I found there was an audio CD version of it. Little did I know this version wasn't an unabridged reading--not even an abridged reading, it was rubbish that was painful to the ears.

In this audio version there about 4 or 5 people, some male, some female, and after every sentence one of them read, overlapping the other. So it goes something like this:

Guy: [The guy sat there looking at the birds]
Now, as soon as he started saying "birds" a female would kick in with the next sentence.
Female: [the birds were acting strange]
then another guy
then somebody else
THE WHOLE WAY THROUGH!

It was so bad, after listening to less than 2 minutes of it, I packed it up, and sent it back. Something that awful shouldn't be on the market. Especially when it's being done to such a fantastic story.