Almost impossible to listen to

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The book is really fascinating and I think I will have to read it instead of listen to it. The writer comes across as arrogant, self obsessed, pompous, pious and extremely unlikable but I think this is due to a horrible narration that makes her sound dry and remote.

Who was your favorite character and why?

As this is an autobiography it is rather odd to consider "favourite character" - this book is about real people and their real lives and deaths not about "characters".

Who might you have cast as narrator instead of Sheila Mitchell?

Juliet Stevenson or any other decent actress with a voice that varies in tone and texture and brings life to a story - Sheila Mitchell kills it dead and makes it such a difficult listen.

Did Testament of Youth inspire you to do anything?

Go and read the book and dump the audio! It did make me think about the state of the world - about war and power and how those who want peace are ridiculed, marginalised and sometimes even punished. It did inspire me to reflect on vested interest and how the powerful abuse their position - but the dreary narration mostly inspired me to go and listen to anything other than this.

Any additional comments?

What a waste! Such a good and worthwhile book with such depth of feeling, intelligence and poignant interest turned into a long drawn out drone - read the excellent review on audible.com for a more detailed dissection of how this narrator gets it so wrong and read the book don't bother with the audio it becomes actually painful after several hours listening and is long in any case. HORRIBLE narration - excellent writing - a good book massacred and some dreadful pronunciation too - don't the editors EVER correct these narrators when they repeatedly mispronounce basic words to such a degree it grates. This is badly done and I will wish for someone to re-do the whole thing.

16 people found this helpful

A Masterpiece

I was forced to read this book for English Literature A Level 30 + years ago and hated it. I was however, 17 and had little life experience. Unlike the young Vera Brittain, who is put in a situation of sink or swim. She chose to swim. I was as an A level student not particularly interest in the pain and suffering of others. Now, as I have lived my own life and worked as a Nurse for many years, this book came to life for me.

The book starts before the outbreak of the Great War and explores women's - 'not quite equal' relationship to men. Remember though, that Brittain is from an upper class family and would not experience the oppression of that of a working class woman. On the contrary, she is relativity privileged. Even so, she eloquently objects to her father 'why can't she go to Oxford when her brother is allowed'.

Later the book tells of her romance with a friend of her brothers, whom she falls madly in love with, but who is sent off to war as it starts. She joins the Nursing team of the Volunteer nursing core and from hear we enter into a story of repeated heartbreak as VB looses her lover, her brother and her closest friend.

So, this time round, I loved and devoured this book with the wisdom I did not hold at 17. lest we forget the great war and the human sacrifice. The book is beautifully narrated and is full of insightful notes of wisdom and philosophy that can only come about through the experience of pain.

I give it a 5 * recommendation as I have been deeply touched by this prose.

5 people found this helpful

a moving insight to living through immense tragedy

learning how to forgive yourself for surviving, whilst accepting that life and love moves on

2 people found this helpful

Beautiful and deeply touching

Beautifully read, deeply touching I have listened to this many times, least we not forget what they all went through.

1 person found this helpful

Powerful and effecting memoir.

Powerful and effecting memoir, a timely feminist read.

My mum has been persuading me to read this for at least twenty years. For some reason, I never did. I knew the story, and saw the recent film last year, and decided it was time, with the commemorations for the 100 years since the end of the First World War, to pick this up.

Though I decided that the style of this would suit an audio-read, and downloaded the Audible (24 hour) version. Though this did take me nearly a fortnight to listen to, I was engrossed in the early 1900s world of Brittain's youth.

It's just heart-breaking, listening to Vera as a mature adult look back at the world of 1914, at her own diaries, letters and poems from the time the world changed forever.

Knowing what was going to happen, it didn't lessen the pain I felt for Vera as each death occurs, seeing her continue to live, seeing her as typifying the experience of so many others.

Testament of Youth takes us from Vera's middle class adolescence as she grew up amidst the years of Women's Suffrage and struggled to earn a place at Oxford to the years of the War and beyond.

The experiences are so vivid, Vera's time nursing, with honest appraisals of the systems, people and behaviours. Quite eye-opening, seeing as Florence Nightingale had revolutionised nursing not too long before.

I cried a few times, there are such moving letters between brother and sister, an incredible relationship kept up even in a war. And I really felt for the young Vera and the naïve outlook that her older counterpart looks back on with a world-weary air. This is very-well conveyed as an audiobook with the narrator giving the Vera of 1914-18 a different voice and air to that of the older woman. The style of writing suits an audiobook perfectly as well, as the writer is addressing her reader directly making it very easy to follow aurally.

Enjoyed the 'post' war parts slightly less than Vera's WWI experiences, but I did like seeing her views on the suffrage movement and how women's rights and treatment in society altered after 1918.

A very important book, written for the ages, will not fail to impress itself upon you.

1 person found this helpful

Painful listening

Julia Fleet above expresses my thoughts too. I won’t repeat what she said so well. An old friend offered me her printed copy and I’m looking forward to a peaceful insightful read.

Memoir as riveting as any historical novel

Enjoyed this memoir very much for both it's intimate personal perspective and historical commentary. I found the readers clipped British accent difficult for my American ear.

Voice of a generation

This was wonderful. I fully understand why this is thought to demonstrate the variety of experiences of the young people in WWI. Britain’s story is unique, but the scale of change and personal trauma she live through is not. The first 2 thirds of the book are particularly compelling accounts of trying to coordinate leave with loved ones and the superstitions that crept into everyday life. The final third deals with life after the war, which initially I was less interested in. I’m glad to have read it though as it covers a period most media ignores - the anguish of finding a new normal; learning that the war time children didn’t understand what their seniors had gone through; ultimately coming to accept that life was worth pursing despite devastating personal loses.

The style of writing is very much of its time and combined with the heavy topics and long chapters it can be a bit of a slog in places. I chose to listen to this on and off over the course of a couple of months.

Fascinating Memoir

Narrator was perfect. Anyone interested in the history of modern women, feminism, and WWI should read this book. Lengthy and still worth every hour of listening.

Emotion recollected in perspicacity

This is a life-changing book about a changed life.

The expert narration of Sheila Mitchell brings the vivid and brilliant mind of Vera Brittain into the sharpest mental focus, and this voice from a dead past speaks the words of the dead into present that needs - perhaps, sadly, will always need - to hear the lessons of history. Her near future failed to heed them; I fear the voices of the Great War through which she lived and suffered are needed as much as those of the subsequent conflict that Brittain's commitment to internationalism could not prevent. From out of those two disasters we have built, in the west at least, structures that have prevented, for the most part, the return of those conflicts for a period that has extended long beyond Vera Brittain's own life yet to which now we seem bent on turning our backs.

Vera Brittain's emotional and intellectual acuity and conviction has steeled my own resolve to be on the side of the right, even if I fear I may not be in the right side of history.

1 person found this helpful