Wonderful? Not a chance.
919340
Boring. Incoherent. Spelling mistakes. Felt like it was written by a 5th grader. The book was not consistent. No emotion. Just bland reading. Don't bother
4139570
Publishers Weekly said it all: "Neither a proper mystery nor particularly fine literature, this haunting novella, for all its strengths, lies uneasily between the two and will fully please few fans of each. "  Readers of art novels may find a respite here, but devotees of mystery, suspense, and crime are unlikely to do so.  The characters are not very interesting and there is inadequate space to develop them.  I can't decide whether the book is missing a third act or a first and third act, but it's missing something with regard to plot.  The texture is OK, but a far cry from the atmospherics of, e.g., a James Lee Burke.  The saddest thing is that the question being posed--what is the parrot talking about?--is given more prominence than the characters, the plot, the mystery or criminality at the heart and (WARNING--SPOILER ALERT) the answer to the question is telegraphed in the jacket design.  It was the old man himself who said that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is the truth.  The book is not like, e.g., PRESUMED INNOCENT--in which the reader anticipates the ending from the beginning, hoping against hope that he or she is wrong, and then discovers (ouch!) that he or she is unfortunately right.  Instead, the book poses the question--could the parrot be talking about a?  b?  c?  d?  You look at the cover, guess "e" and discover at the end that you are right.  The deflated response is particularly unfortunate, given the historical enormity at the center of the answer.
4537153
I like almost everything and am for the most part easily entertained.  I don't put much demands on movies to say if something was pretty good or not.  This could have been a very good movie.  It just wasn't.  My wife and I both thought, "didn't these people read this script before agreeing to be in the movie."  This movie was not worth watching.  I thought how can it miss with this cast.  But it does.  It seems to me that the director was either very inexperienced or just missed on this one.  I believe at least some of these people who are praising the movie on here must have some personal stake in it.  Nicole Kidman deserves and Oscar for this??? Come on....
1904014
Ann B. Ross, Miss Julia series...absolutely wonderful...this one not so much.
4611062
Really.  An improbable group of characters, most of whom are barely post-adolescent, who possess skills and abilities far beyond what in the most remote sense might be even marginally believable, find themselves in a position to save the world as we know it.  No extra credit given for pseudo-intellectual trappings employed to disguise a poorly constructed plot.
3436050
And not the kind of good that's like, sort of good, you know? Because that wouldn't really do it any justice. It's like EXTRA good.
683331
Publisher's Weekly's "immensely satisfying reading experience" ain't really all that. This is not commercial fiction with an easily-understandable beginning, middle and end. It is very entertaining and it certainly lingers in the mind long after a first reading, because it is so unsatisfying. Like life. The black help who we want to believe has special virtue turns out not to be of much real help (quite the contrary) but only as flawed as the white characters. Surprise, surprise. The original question is left unanswered and new ones have arisen to clutter up the plot. Would it all have gone the same way had the "little friend" of the title been successfully denied contact with the family in the first place? Or would it simply have all gone wrong in some other way? And would that other way have been as entertaining as this one? We can only hope.
1900662
If you're lucky enough to get one that works, they're pretty good.  But odds of that are less than 50%.  Very little quality control in the manufacturing of this thing.  I bought two for my kids for Christmas.  One worked, one didn't.  Exchanged one to replace the one that didn't work....didn't work.  So I gave up.  The one still works and seems to do pretty good.  Tempted to try again with another one, but I see the reviews haven't trended upwards.
4762376
I should have expected to be disappointed by this from the off. I voted in the Kindle Scout campaign on the off chance that I might like it, being somewhat intrigued, but with many doubts about it. Quite often my doubts are proved wrong and I end up enjoying the novel, hence the vote. This time I came away feeling rather ambivalent.

You have Gladys. The name implies, from a British point of view, a type of Hyacinth Bucket, a more-than-middle-aged gossip who has nothing better to do all day than spy on her neighbours and use her findings as a way of pushing herself up, rather unsuccessfully

Well, this isn't actually the case. The lady in question is feeling the impending doom of becoming middle aged, just short of her fortieth, and has realised that her life has become the same boring routine just rinsed and repeated. Of course, she has always been a bit of a snoop and a gossip, as shes actually a journalist, of all things. But, despite her high hopes, shes never gotten the scoops to bring herself high enough and has ended up in a mediocre job reporting on holiday destinations for a not-so-well-known magazine.

So, in an attempt to remind herself of the thrill days of her late teens, and to bring back the excitement from when she got together with her husband (which happened to be on a snooping exercise), she ropes him into helping her check out this suspicious house.

Now this should have been exciting, a laugh a minute! And at times it was actually funny and exciting. But then it got bogged down with all the domestic details. Ive never been the kind of female who hungers after Laboutin shoes, or anything similar (not being able to wear heals due to my back certainly nips that one in the bud), or the kind who jealously appraises those around her, wanting to have the pert bum of a best friend, or anothers ample bosom, or just simply the perfect body for the perfect clothing. Yet Rachel is bothered with all these details. If you're happy to read all the glorious details of what it takes to be the perfect wife, down to making a wonderful Valentines meal in between bouts of waxing and shaving, and having the perfect outfit to go with it on a shoestring budget, in between all the shenanigans, then this might be for you. Plus, on top of that, all the other Sex in the City-style discussions with the best friends (I just realised that some of the scenes of Rachel could have easily been cringe-worthingly seen on such a show), then yes, do give it a go.

Unfortunately, however, it was these social and domestic scenes that seemed to drag somewhat. We got bogged down in too much detail, with the story taking forever to go anywhere at times. If it weren't for the fact that I refuse to DNF a book, I might have done it at one of these points. There was a grand moment of breakthrough and an exciting high, where I believed that the story should have ended, and I was then rather surprised and disappointed as it dragged on through another domestic scene, before reaching the actual finale. Its a bit like any Classical period artist, with all the false endings; if you drag it out too long, the audience just gets bored and falls asleep before its done. Even though the ending was somewhat good, the dragged-out feel just left me feeling meh and not really caring for any of it.

Im not at all heartbroken; Im just disappointed at the wasted time. The only reason Im giving it so many stars is that Im ever generous and that there were moments of excitement inside. Otherwise it would have been thrown straight into rubbish pile with the other disappointments.
724586
Ah, these books one receives as Christmas presents, no doubt the benefactors mean well....How dearly I would have loved to have settled down to a mystery about that many-storied beast, the wyvern.  And, since there is a very well-depicted wyvern on the cover, and the title rather leads one to expect it, surely I was not amiss in expecting such a lark.  But, alas, no wyvern - just an old family who possess the surname.  And alack, no mystery - the plot and characters are as stale as ergoted rye, but without even the supernatural or hallucinogenic to excite one.  Wading through this mostly banal novel was rather like touching upon several poorly copied parts of Dickens' novels with a touch of the Brontes thrown in for good measure.

The only thing that surprised me, from time to time, was the discovery that Le Fanu could be a dashed good writer when he put his mind and heart into it.  He is particularly good at detailed landscapes, human psychology and lines of poetic insight.  Unfortunately, these passages are too few, too far between, too often over-the-top to redeem the novel.  But, as an example, one occasionally comes across a passage like the following:

"Future-present-past. The future - mist, a tint, a shadow. The cloud on which fear and hope project their airy phantoms, living in imagination, and peopled by romance - a dream of dreams. The present only we possess, man's momentary dominion, plastic under his hand as the clay under the potter's - always a moment of the present in our absolute power - always that fleeting, plastic moment speeding into the past - immutable, eternal.  The metal flows molten by, and then chills and fixes for ever."p. 222

But such passages are rare indeed.  They pop out - if I may be permitted the trope - like audacious wyverns amidst tired, overworked prosaic basset-hounds. Altogether, more than a letdown. ---Good title though.
.
4073887
The review below is civilized and tolerant almost to a fault. I, too, anticipated something rare and fascinating from Pfitzner's masterpiece, which has a strong stage history in Germany but almost zero in the U.S. But in my case the expectations weren't fulfilled--this is ultra-conservative music that shows not the slightest influence of the twentieth centruy. The idiom resembles seamless, uninspired movie music, assuming the movie in question has almost no action and endless duets and monologues on arcane subjects of interest only to Jesuits and historicans of the Vatican's dicta on church music.

That said, the performance is a knockout. This could well be Fischer-Dieskau's most impressive opera portrayal (he had a habit of excelling in oddball operas--see Mathis der Maler); Gedda, fasbaender, and the rest of the cast sing with equal conviction. Kubelik is close to an ideal conductor. And yet there really is no drama here for the listener who can't see the stage. Maybe that's the secret of Palestrina--it needs a stage production to capture the eye. That's true of Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die Tote Stadt, and other operas that are congested and over-composed--they must come alive visually to reveal their potential.
4713830
I enjoy clear, crisp sound; this is neither. At best, it is simply acceptable. What makes it worth keeping is the peerless performance of Alexander Scourby. Nobody is even close. Nobody.
4627559
I wish that I meant unbelievable in a good way. Nothing about this story is not a bad trope. I hit the 20% point and quit. This is, in the words from the Princess Bride, inconceivable. A romance that was forced into the story. A vaguely hidden betrayal that was obvious, and a main character who is lucky not skilled. Big time pass for me.
3354319
I know many people truly love this book and I respect that. Give me a moment to tell what I wish had been different about it. What inspired me to read On The Day You Were Born was I was watching the DVD of the excellent production of Dr. Seuss' My Many Colored Days and saw a similar DVD of this advertised, so I went to the library and got the book for us--me and my cousin's pre-school aged son whom I was babysitting--to read. I had high hopes because the idea sounded so neat, but neither Tyler nor I were able to take it seriously for more than a moment. He said, "None of that happened!" And he was right. Whereas Debra Frasier could have made an interesting and true scientific story that fostered in a young mind the vast intricate panoply of life and the universe in its ongoing rhythms, she delivered something fluffy. She could have written about how on the day you were born the earth spun on it axis giving us daytime and nighttime, and the snows came farther down Mt Fuji, and salmon swam upstream on their return journey home, the grasses grew, comets raced around the solar system, and etc and it would have been an interesting account of a day's life on planet earth and in space. Ms. Frasier instead gave us an impossible fantasy about the whole planet being super-happy about the arrival of one more baby. Her claims that on the day you were born the fish and birds all got excited and told one another to look for you and the stars did dances and African animals marched in happy parades and other assorted impossible things, well, it missed the mark of fun fantasy and hit somewhere around "silly". I don't see this as a classic. The pictures were not that bright or interesting and the things the author claimed happened never did. While it's "all right" this book is not the great thing so many like to say it is.
3756225
Why didn't this film do better at the box office?  Was it the marketing or, was it was just too cerebral for most of the movie going public.  Perhaps the trailer gave the impression of unremitting and unrewarded suffering.  In the last case, be assured that there is true and well deserved redemption that comes with a twist at the end.  Whatever the problem was, the fault was not the film.  But, it prevented this movie from drawing an audience in numbers it should have.  And that is a shame.  Its failure at the box office will further dampen the spirits and limit the opportunities of truly original film makers.  Don't let this happen.  Buy this movie and reward intelligent, creative and thought provoking films that will provide a welcome relief to the normal mindless Hollywood fare.
2035797
Science fiction calls for audience to "suspend its disbelief"  We know going in that what we are about to see is fiction and impossible. But for fun we suspend our disbelief so we can get on with the story.  But about halfway into this flick that threshold collapses and we can no longer enjoy the story because it becomes childishly unbelievable. And even if we extend our license to the director to "go ahead, make us believe," it was impossible to avoid giggling while the movie's climax rolled: a woman chasing the baddie while holding her abdomen together with her fingers after she has undergone emergency life-saving surgery conducted by a computerized robot. I don't want to spoil the suspense but my advice is wait for the cable version. We had very high hopes considering this movie's pedigree. But other than a terrific first few minutes, this one is disappointing.
734082
This could have been a wonderful story if the author hadn't felt the need to fail back on the easy way to fall back on using S..., F...., & the real and final use of God and Jesus names in vain.  No doubt Ms Longley has a talent, but I will not be purchasing any of her books.  Call me old fashioned but I enjoy gifted writers that now how to write a story that everyone enjoy the read and leave bedroom sex to the readers on version of true sexual love looks like.