Miss McCullough's plan [in "The Thorn Birds"] is to trace three generations of a New Zealand family, especially the Cleary women: Fee, Meggie and Justine (grandmother, mother, granddaughter) through poverty and wealth, loving and dying and all the emotional terrain in between. She takes her title from a Celtic legend about a wondrous bird that sings only once in its life…. (p. 13)

Miss McCullough wants us to see that her characters experience great joy bought with equally great suffering. The question along the way is not whether they will hurt as much as how and when the blows will come, and who will take the meanest cut.

Though "The Thorn Birds" is much more compelling entertainment than the popcorn novels waiting down at the neighborhood Safeway, it still shares the company of fiction so machined with plots and outfitted with colorful characters that even when it achieves conviction...