At first, I thought The Sage of Waterloo was one of those books that ought to have been a short story: too little pith awash in too much narrative, stretched out to novella length to please an editor or a publisher or a self-indulgent author. After finishing the book, I can safely say this is not so: The Sage of Waterloo should've been an essay on Waterloo, hold the rabbit and/or the sage.

There is no story in this book. Or rather, the story in this book is only about Waterloo, the battle and the slaughter and the loss and the impact on the surrounding countryside. The rabbit (who might also be the sage, though I suspect that role is meant for his grandmother) doesn't really add anything beyond the tale of Waterloo, itself.

Instead, he proses on and on about his younger days (learning about Waterloo) and his old home (at the ruins of the chateau near Waterloo) and leaving home (where he misses Waterloo) and the horrors of humanity (and what they did at Waterloo) and his family and other animals (and how they were impacted by Waterloo). Whenever his narrative brushes too close to anything approaching an actual story of his own, it skitters right back inside the story of Waterloo---just as a rabbit frightened of the unknown flees back to its hutch.

This entire book is an exercise in anticipation and disappointment as, over and over again, the story promises to appear only to dissipate once more into the never-ending drone about Waterloo.

There are moments of what might be considered wisdom, but the wisdom is so tired and specifically sized for rabbit consumption---"If something bad happens, William, chew through the problem methodically, as if it's a long, hard carrot"---that only the most untried or inexperienced or determined of readers would find it novel or helpful.

The book also contains something that could possibly be seen as a ghost story, but the rabbit spends so much of the book harping on his grandmother seeing things and animals learning to "read the air" and all the pointless, violent death at the battle that the final ghostly reveal feels expected and anticlimactic. There's nothing spooky about it, just something obvious that the rabbit could've shared to greater effect 200 pages earlier.

Francombe clearly has strong feelings about this battle and the lives lost and how we've written the history after the fact, but I would've appreciated reading her thoughts far more in a medium designed for just such a purpose. Encountering them through the underused and irrelevant mouthpiece of a rabbit renders the entire piece toothless and pedantic. I shrug at the tragedy of the battle instead of weeping at it. ( )

This book felt vaguely reminiscent of Watership Down to me, likely due to the rabbit narrator. William is a rabbit at Hougoumont, an old farm near the site of the Battle of Waterloo. The battle and the myths surrounding it loom large in this book, as the rabbits thoroughly discuss and dissect the battle which so transformed their home. Overall, this was an odd read, but not bad. I just couldn't help but feeling something was missing from the story to pull the concepts together and drive the action. ( )

This wasn't at all a bad book, but it had too many improbabilities and overly anthropomorphized the rabbits, giving them deeper insight than we'd expect. It just doesn't match the hoopla it seems to have gotten in some published reviews.

At first glance, a "rabbit story" might remind readers of Watership Down, but in fact The Sage of Waterloo reminds me more of another Richard Adams novel, Traveller, the Civil War as seen by Robert E. Lee's horse, and The Sage of Waterloo has the same limitations as that lesser known of Adams's novels. It's lacking in action, too meditative, and leaves the reader with a rather trivial but also unrealistic conclusion, relying as it does on a probably human ghost.

The Sage of Waterloo, published in 2015, dealt with the Battle of Waterloo in its bicentennial year, but there's nothing particularly distinctive about the choice of Waterloo; and, if the novel had been published just two years earlier, it might just as well have been The Sage of Gettysburg. ( )

A unique fantasy about the history of a family of rabbits who have lived for centuries at the site of Napoleon"s defeat at Waterloo. The central character, William, learns much from his grandmother Old Lavender who eavesdrops on two women who sit on a park bench and orally histories about the battles there. William is a white rabbit and all this spurs his interest in where his heritage began. Like Watership Down but with less drama. ( )

This little gem of a novel recounts the Battle of Waterloo from the perspective of a rabbit who lives on a Hougoumont farm -- near the site of the iconic battle -- 200 years later. William, our narrator, is a philosopher. Old Lavender, his grandmother, teaches him and his siblings and cousins living in the warren the way of the world and the role of history in helping us make sense of the present.

My library copy is riddled with flags, marking passages that made me chuckle in delight or sigh in recognition or simply think "what beautiful writing." Here is an example of the first:

"Mornings were reserved for pop quizzes:
'What did Wellington have for breakfast?' (Hot sweet tea and toast. Napoleon, by the way, took his breakfast on a silver plate.) 'Why was Wellington such a poor rider?' (He slid around on his saddle too much, wearing holes in his breeches.) 'How long was Generalfeldmarschall Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher pinned under his dead horse?' (Even longer than it takes to pronounce his name properly.) 'What did they use to revive him?' (Blücher, not the horse: gin and garlic.)"

Here is an example of the last, which occurs after William finds himself outside the walls of his home, in a place he has never been:

"I wondered if it was simple coincidence that the garden had high walls, or just a bit of whimsy on the part of Moon. Hougoumont was walled, too. It's funny how familiarity pops up in uncharted places. If you think about it, our passage along the Hollow Way is often sprinkled with landmarks of similar shape and hue, like stepping-stones over a stream. These familiar objects are not random, but present themselves with a sort of intentional symmetry, as if pointing the way. Our passage from one to the other really should not be taken for granted. Think about the turns your life has taken (I mean really think -- stare out a window for at least an hour), and you'll discover a startling, sometimes pleasing, invariably inexplicable logic in the way things have happened to you."

It's impossible to do justice to this little novel. It started a bit slowly but by page 30 I was enchanted. William is wonderful scholarly narrator and the story is poignant and moving. It's not so much "about" the Battle of Waterloo as it is about human foibles and the terrible legacy of our persistent investment in war. It is neither political nor strident. Rather, reading Francombe's tale is essentially the act of reflection, perhaps more rewarding than staring out a window for an hour. ( )