Product Description

The surprise bestseller from the Sainsbury's supermarket worker that hit the national newspaper front pages, now available in a stunning mass-market edition Welcome to Birddom - a land where Magpies rule. Dark forces are at work. An evil intelligence is masterminding their inexorable rise. Dominance has been achieved by systematic genocide and slaughter. In Birddom, blackbird and sparrow have been exterminated. The magpie has replaced the pigeon in the city and the starling in the garden. For small birds throughout the land, survival is everything. Birddom needs a hero. A bird to fight in the darkness, and bring light back to the land. But what can one bird do in the face of such evil?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #703535 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
"'Should we believe the hype? Yes' Sunday Express 'An assured performance' Times Educational Supplement 'An epic tale in the tradition of Watership Down and Lord of the Rings' --AlanYentob"

Times Educational Supplement
'a heroic epic...savage as well as sentimental..an assured performance with dynamic narrative and structure'

What's on in London 2004
'a mesmerising debut..Woodall's adventure makes for a gripping and incredibly moving story'

Customer Reviews

Avian Racism
I don't care much for the Watership Down style of anthropomorphism at the best of times, but this is disgusting. If there is one thing the world does not need, it's yet another excuse to persecute the magpie. This poor bird is beset by legend; it's unlucky, it has a drop of the devil's blood under its tongue, it sat "jabbering over the drowned world" rather than enter the Ark... Now Clive Woodall casually accuses it of genocide. The magpie is our most beautiful & intelligent native bird & it really does not deserve this vilification. Yes, it does raid nests & feed (partly) on eggs & fledgelings: so do crows & all the corvidae. Birds of prey predate on all our smaller birds but they are, rightly, protected. The magpie cannot help its diet & has to feed its own young. This does not make it evil, a human concept that no bird can understand. Woodall would be quite properly pilloried if he wrote these things about Jews or black people or Muslims but for some reason it's fine to impute all manner of moral turpitude to a poor harmless bird. My copy bears the chilling words: SOON TO BE A DISNEY FILM! I do sincerely hope not. There is already a bounty on magpies in America: does Woodall have the slightest idea of the bloodshed he may be responsible for?

The worst book I have EVER read.
Basically, the magpies are killing off all the small bird species in Birddom. Kirrick, who is the last robin, is given a mission from a wise owl to persuade powerful birds to come to their aid.

The only reason I kept on reading this was so I could write this review! For this to be compared to Watership Down and Lord of the Rings is absolutely ridiculous. I just can't understand how they could be mentioned in the same breath.

The characters have no character at all, the owls are wise, magpies are evil and Kirrick is nothing in particular.

What annoyed and bored me the most about this book was the way you are not shown anything. You are told what a character is rather than coming to the conclusion yourself by their thoughts and actions. At every opportunity you are told how brave Kirrick is yet I saw nothing so exceptional about him. Because of this I didn't care about any of the characters at all, as they were boring and clearly not real. There are magpies ripping birds apart everywhere and I didn't feel horror, sadness or anything except disgust at the descrptions of it.

Everything is too black and white as well. The good characters are perfect, the bad characters are torturing and murdering everywhere, and Traska [who is often described as 'that evil bird'] rapes another magpie. I just found it a bit over the top.

I mainly read books above my age level. Yet I do not want to read about all this gore and that rape scene. I wouldn't mind if there was something to back it up like a good writing style, good characters or a decent plot, but there is none of that. The ending is so cheesy that I wanted to laugh, cry and be sick all at once. The only upside was that this is a really short book.

If you truly enjoyed Watership Down, then you won't like this at all.

Watered down
Fans of animal literature aren't spoiled for choice and when a new angle appears in a novel it can generate quite a bit of hype. Clive Woodall's story of one Robin's fateful part in a war between magpies and the rest of the bird kingdom should make great reading. However, it doesn't. The story never really creates any depth in with it's characters, although the evil magpies get most of the exploration. It's adult at times, with some quite graphic and visceral scenes and it's the menace of the magpies which keep you interested. The hero's however are quite replaceable, which is a great shame. The most disappointing aspect is that the book is split in to two stories, with some overlap in terms of characters. I feel a more canny author would have have crafted this in to one story, which would have created a more epic novel. Overall, it's rather predictable, a tad shallow, but a pleasant enough book to wile away a few hours.