Vintage Book Review: Time of the Singing of Birds
Today’s book review is for a vintage book in my collection: Time of the Singing of Birds by Grace Livingston Hill. I read it in March as part of the Read Your Bookshelf challenge hosted by Chantel Reads All Day with the prompt “time.”
Disclosure: This post includes Amazon affiliate links. The Kindle version of this book is currently only 99 cents.
My Review
Time of the Singing of Birds was written in 1945. It takes place during World War II. The setting seems to be somewhere within a day’s train ride of Washington D.C.
The novel opens with Barney Vance, a wounded soldier, returning home for an R&R furlough. The heroine is the modest and lovely Margaret Roselle, a schoolteacher neighbor whom Barney remembers as a sweet little girl called “Sunny.” The secondary romance is between Barney’s war buddy “Stormy” Applegate, who is MIA somewhere on the front lines, and the sister of another war buddy, Cornelia Mayberry, who just happens to be visiting a relative in Barney and Margaret’s neighborhood.
Being a romance novel, the war part of the story is somewhat glossed over and stretches credulity, but it was an interesting read for all that. (And I thought the device of contrasting “Sunny” the sweetheart and “Stormy” the warrior was pretty funny.)
As I’ve mentioned before, I read most of GLH’s books in the 1980s when I was in my teens. I think of them as literary “comfort food,” and I enjoy grabbing one to re-read every now and then. Lately, as I’ve been re-reading them I’ve started making notes of books and hymns mentioned in the novels.
Books within the Book
I didn’t find mention of any specific book titles in this novel, but a school boy recited the first line (and presumably the rest of the poem Bingen on the Rhine: “A soldier of the legion lay a-dying in Algiers…”
Hymns (and Other Songs)
Songs, though… There was quite a bit of singing throughout this book. I guess with a title like Time of the Singing of Birds, there ought to be. Here are a few quotes:
Amelia, sitting at the piano, let her fingers run into several old-time songs that caught the whim of the crowd and made them hum together and finally pour out their voices in a big peppy chorus. “School days! School days! Dear old golden rule days…” …Then came “Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet.” They were such very old songs that Roxy marveled those young things should know the words, even though the radio had been reviving them now and again. And there was “Juanita” and “Annie Laurie” and “Old Black Joe” and “Swanee River.” …Somebody suddenly started “The Old Rugged Cross,” and strange to say, even in that crowd, everybody seemed to know the words and rather liked to sing it… Then, as the last notes of the hymn died away Barney struck up in his clear beautiful baritone: “Abide with me: fast falls the even tide; The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide!”
“Look at that sunset. Isn’t it glorious? It makes my heart thrill the way it thrilled me while you were singing, And the glory, the glory of the Lord, shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.“
Just a hymn, but it was sung almost as if it were spoken, and yet the voice was very beautiful, mellow, tender. I see a Man at God’s right hand…
Barney sang the verses and the choir softly came in on the chorus, On Calv’ry’s brow my Saviour died…
The song that Barney sang that evening was “Ye Must Be Born Again.”
Bonus: Parlor Games
“We’re all just hungering and thirsting to do some of the old-time things we used to do. How about playing ‘I have a rooster for sale,’ and ‘Drop the handkerchief,’ and ‘Here we go round the barberry bush,’ and a few of those. Nothing like the old-time childish games to take off the stiffness.”
I know about “Drop the handkerchief,” and I figure “Here we go round the barberry bush” is probably the same as the mulberry bush, but I am not familiar with “I have a rooster for sale.” Have you heard of that one? I didn’t find anything about it online with a quick search.
Other Grace Livingston Hill Book Reviews
- Crimson Mountain – In which I decide I’m not mechanically inclined.
- The Enchanted Barn – In which my friend and her family move into a barn.
- Beauty for Ashes — In which I start tracking books and hymns mentioned by GLH
