A Dog of Flanders

saddest book i ever read. Amazing reader, very clear voice.

(5 stars)

Afiefh

breaking my heart

(5 stars)

coolsparks

Oh my! That must have been written in a century *before* even the previous one! I DID suppose that the privation and suffering of wartime would cross through lives of the characters. Yet no Bismarck-related strife entered in, nor did it feature another war affecting Flanders, that one being fought early in the 20th-century and leaving misery and devastation across most of Europe. On landscape, on living things, upon souls……. and upon the society that emerges from such harm, with its attitudes forged by the heat of such violence. ………. Here, Normal times and normal people doing normal things is where the tragedy of this story lies. ………. As I listened to this story, I found I began having conversations with myself out loud, and these conversations carried forth for longer and longer spells as the story progressed. ……………………….. The drift of my murmurings was that SURELY the little fellow would have suffered enough by NOW to allow for an uplifting or redemptive element to enter the story. Well, ….…..perhaps now you know the actual ending. Stunning. (Let me take a moment to share that I am not new to dealing with austere themes in narratives.) ………. I also noticed that the drift of my murmurings to myself shifted as my sense of its place in time had to be adjusted. When I was thinking the story took place early in the last century, I was prepared for an O.Henry-variety twist of pain and truth to draw the story to a close. When the story DID conclude, I found myself reviewing all the assumptions that I, as listener, begin to weave into the background of stories I am hearing them……..I find I am sifting the work for little clues that can indicate whether something was written in more recent times, even to distinctions between one decade the next. Whether it shapes us, Society, through our expectations of how long a child or parent will live, …………………. or it shapes us through the technology newly introduced (lending perspective to what vast distances are gradually telescoped by the advent of trains, telegraph messages, or airplanes),…… in such ways do I find my Approach to hearing a story Will Subtly Shift as I gather clues as to how women’s roles are depicted, or how immigrants are treated. While I was caught with a stunned feeling at the end of this book (and there are days when I might have borne the surprise with greater resilience), I remain certain that I am glad I experienced this story. I have no regrets about choosing to listen to it. . The reader is Very Fine. Any narrator is, in essence, our GUIDE through any new story, each story being, in essence, a fresh tangle (and tango) of lives and circumstances. To this narrator, you can entrust your sensibilities and your senses. You are permitted access to the text as written, by way of this guide who allows both sense and sensibility to proceed free of being snagged or slugged. Sometimes, a narrator’s work will have distracting pronunciation issues ………………….…………..and other times, a narrator’s work will be hobbled by technical issues, sometimes related to the level of the narrator’s experience of Reading Aloud , and sometimes simply by the level of experience in Recording themselves Reading Aloud. ………………. On a more general note, I continue to be utterly grateful to all at LibriVox who make possible our access to these works in the public domain. Words do not suffice to express my thanks, so these will have to do for now.

A Dog of Flanders

(5 stars)

stbalbach

<br /><i>A Dog of Flanders: A Christmas Story</i> is a young adult book written by the Victorian English author Marie Louise de la Ramée (aka "Ouida"). It's a sentimental animal fable, part of her lifelong campaign to draw attention to the problem of cruelty to dogs. It's set in Flanders where dogs are routinely worked to death. I found the story pleasant and emotionally moving. It can be overly sentimental in that Victorian way, and has some Romantic Nationalism, but the story is good and leaves one with a positive feeling in the end. Although Ouida wrote over 40 novels and was very popular in her time, she is hardly read anymore, this childrens books now appears to be the most popular of her works. But in her time her most famous work was <i>Under Two Flags</i> (1867), which was still being published and read in the 20th century, including 4 different movie adaptations. Likewise <i>A Dog of Flanders</i> seems to have inspired at least 7 movies, as recently as 1999. It also sells well in Japan. See also the book which has a lot of original artwork: <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/dogofflanderschr00ouid" rel="nofollow"><i>A Dog of Flanders: A Christmas Story</i></a>. ---- Roger Melin's LibriVox reading is very good and appropriate for the story, it's at a professional level. My only complaint is I wish Roger would not (try to) raise the pitch of his baritone voice to sound like a woman or little boy when reading dialogue :) [STB, 12-18-09, 287]

Well written, true to life but inexorably pitiful

(2.5 stars)

kerriganm

Five stars for one of my favorite readers, Roger Melin. Four stars for a good dog story. Minus two stars for making me cry even while I despised the morass of pathos the book devolved into. Minus half a star for calling it a Christmas story. Really?! Here's where I'd put a new paragraph if my iPad let me. I don't want to reveal too much, but I think you should be warned- I wish I was- that the ending could have been written by Hans Christian Anderson. If he's not familiar, let me explain: remember his famous story The Match Girl? Here's the plot: a poor, cold, friendless girl tries to keep life and soul together by selling matches (to disguise her begging from the authorities). She fails, dying alone in the snow. The End. How about The Little Mermaid? You know how it really ends? She doesn't get the guy. She doesn't find love and happiness. She dies. But Anderson sets it up as a happy ending. How? SHE GOES TO PURGATORY INSTEAD OF HELL. You've been warned.

A beautiful and poignantly sad children's story

(5 stars)

ListeninginChicago

I'm not a literary critic - for me this was simply a lovely children's story about a boy and his dog and the bond of friendship between them. It is a solo recording by Roger Melin and very well done. Caution: The next review (from stbalbach) contains a spoiler.

(5 stars)

BJ

This story has a great moral. Never look down on someone who has less money than yourself. Love, honesty, integrity, etc., has a wealth far greater than all the money in the world. The reader is superb!!

(5 stars)

Ben & Jamie Stevenson

about the best story I've heard on here. and beautifully read

great short

(5 stars)

James E

reminded me of perriot and really enjoyed .