“Atonement” by Ian McEwan

“A person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn and not easily mended.”
– Ian McEwan, Atonement.
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It’s the summer of 1935, and a thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis misunderstands her older sister Celia’s relationship with their family gardener Robbie, and in a day a series of events will lead her to commit sin more grave than anything the price of which the two people have to pay for years, and she will be left atoning for it for the rest of her life.
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While the premise of the book is so enticing, the story goes real slow and the element of suspense and wonder what first made me go for this book was lost in the slow pace writing and overly detailed description. Very few books can make the narration from different POVs work, and this just didn’t work for me.
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The wartime chapters were extremely generic and unnecessarily crawling. Also, the idea of the ‘flawed’ judgment of a teenager, bringing in dire consequences felt like a fluke.
Other than that the writer has worked well with words and you can feel yourself looking forward to find out what happens next, in bits and pieces.
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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐/5
Reading difficult: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5
Genre: fiction, historical-fiction, romance, classics, historical