Rating: 
Summary: Very good.
Review: Damn, I wish I could write like this.
Rating: 
Summary: A childish imagination destroys multiple relationships.
Review: Briony is an imaginative child, an aspiring author. Her fantasies usually revolve around heroines, falls from glory and happy endings. Performing her dramas is also one of Briony's passons and "The Fall of Arabella" was to be the latest production, done in honor of her college-age brother's return from school.The description of the preparations, including role rehearsals by less-than-talented cousins, easily enamor the reader to precocious Briony. That changes dramatically when one of her cousins, Lola, is ... assaulted shortly after Briony witnessed an intimate scene between her sister Cecelia and a would-be lover, Robbie Turner. Robbie Turner is the son of the Tallis family's charlady and has been a favorite of the head of the Tallis household...so much so that Robbie has been college educated by the senior Tallis and he has also agreed to fund Robbie's subsequent medical education. As an aside, it is interesting to see that the British social structure is such that Mrs. Tallis finds such financial backing of someone from the servant class to be inappropriate. For that matter, the education of her eldest daughter, Cecelia, seems a waste of money as well. The quest for an appropriate husband is far more important! Briony utilizes her flair for the dramatic and her penchant for heroics to decide that Robbie has assaulted her sister and the dark figure she witnessed running away from her cousin's assault scene could be no other than Robbie. He is arrested, even though Briony immediately begins to doubt her own pronouncements, and Robbie spends several years in prison. Time is then propelled forward to Robbie's participation in World War II and the flight from Dunkirk. Cecelia is a nurse and Briony is a nursing student, exposed to the brutalities of war as critically injured men are returned from the front. Briony lives the full brunt of her guilt, knowing full well who her cousin's true assailant is. The ending of the story takes an interesting turn and it is for the reader to discover. Briony is in her seventies; she knows that her life is nearing its end. She is a famous author with a book that cannot be published during her lifetime. Therein lies the twist and the reader is left to his/her imagination! The story is slow moving at times and is more interesting through the war years, Briony's final confrontation of her own guilt and the destruction she has caused within her own family.
Rating:
Summary: Surprising, and Surprisingly Good
Review: The plots of some books are easily categorized. Ones where the first paragraph lets you know what the arc of the book is going to be. It sounds interesting. You want to read it. You were right in your prediction. It gives you a comfortable feeling to have been right. And you don't have to think. This is not one of those books. At least in its most fundamental sense it is not. It seems to be at first. In 1935, on a country estate, a young girl with a vivid imagination tries to explain something that she sees. She does not understand what she has seen, but how many of us do at that age. She thinks she has seen something she has not. She is not puzzled, she is sure of what she has seen, and what it means, but she is wrong. That evening other events lead to misleading, but convincing, statements to the police. Then everyone must live with the consequences. Five years later, that now young woman must come to grips with what she has set in motion, and its consequences. Simple enough, and if that was all there was, it would be a good book. That's not all there is. The book goes further forward, to 1999. Events have played out. People have lived their lives. We have to accept truth, and the truth is what makes what would be a good book a great book. The difference, the ending, makes it a fantastic choice for those of us who hate to read a book only once!
Rating: 
Summary: Painful beyond belief
Review: This book has so much potential. It was an interesting idea, the characters were excellent, and McEwan is an excellent writer. Why, you may ask then, did I give it only two stars? The Answer is the detail. There is WAY to much of it. The paragraphs go on and on like some kind of infernal device designed to destory my love of reading and my sanity. This book could have been about 1/3 the length without changing the plot. It's like trying to read a bad combination of "The Scarlet letter" and "Pride and Prejudice". You get the amazingly long and boring descriptions of TSL and the pointless descriptions of upper class characters that are impossible to relate to. I don't know what McEwan was trying to prove when he wrote this book, but all he proved to me is that this book is filled with pretentious [***] that only arrogent snobs with too much time on their hands can enjoy. Those of us who deal in reality will not enjoy this novel
Rating:
Summary: What a great read!
Review: This book was a great reading experience. I was amazed,after finishing it, that it was a relatively short book because it seemed to be a work of both depth and width. I loved it and commend the author and thank him. It is a rare reading experience (I am tempted to say "these days") to have such rich interior and exterior 'worlds' created in a novel. Having just finished the book, I am wondering if Briony is a "bad seed" sort of girl/woman. Well, I will be thinking about this book for a while, but it will be a pleasure.
Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: If I feel like I gained something, anything, from a book after I finish it, I usually say I liked the book. I gained NOTHING from reading this book. No character development, poor historical context and descriptions, boring predictable story. Sentences were structured well and the book had the potential for a decent story, that's why I gave it 2 instead of 1 star. Don't waste your time with this book.
Rating: 
Summary: very well-written
Review: Briony Tallis is a highly imaginative 13-year-old in the summer of 1935. She puts her imagination to work writing stories and plays and seeking out exciting and interesting things from her life to use in her stories. In her desperate need for some story-worthy excitement on which to base a story, Briony turns on her sisters love interest, Robbie Turner. Turning him into a violent maniacal murderer in her mind, she doesn't hesitate to accuse him of the rape of her 15-year-old cousin, even though she didn't clearly see the attacker. In the aftermath of her accusation, too young to give voice to any to any doubts she might have and too naïve to realize the consequences of her actions, she tells the police what she's convinced she saw, forever changing the lives of herself and her family. The book is divided into four parts. The first part is devoted to character development, the rape, the accusation. The second part is five years later, during the war. Robbie is fighting in France and Briony's sister, Cecilia, is a nurse in London. The third part focuses on Briony and her own nurses training, as well as her struggle to come to grips with her past actions. The final part is many decades later, when Briony is in her 70s, reflecting on the past. I thought this was a very well-written book. Something about the author's writing style really clicked with me. The story dragged at times, and I wasn't entirely satisfied with the ending, but it was definitely worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: "Atonement" was amazing
Review: I probably read one piece of modern fiction a year that is really, really good -- if that. This book was one of them. It was amazing. It begins with a terrible, but understandable, mistake, which the author calls a crime, committed by a naive, silly, self-important little girl, which ruins the lives of two people close to her. It is real, she is real, they are real. The war scenes that follow are as genuine and as intense as anything in "All Quiet on the Western Front" or "Journey to the End of the Night" - they convey the confusion, horror and futility of war, at least for the common soldier. I can't believe this man has not been to war - which, given his nationality and his apparent age, must be the case. The ending is startling, and, to me, terrible. It was worth my time. If you like the first chapter or two, it is well worth yours.
Rating:
Summary: Not everything is dependable-- but this book is great
Review: At their best novels can take readers to another place, another time, make them feel like they have another life, they are another person. But, still readers depend on what is written, it is like the writer has the power over us readers, over what we read, where we go to or even what we think. Some may say we are deceived, led to believe in what is written, or in what someone wants us to believe. In 'Atonement' Ian McEwan gets all this concept of readers/writers a goes a bit futher. A narrative is an entity over which neither the reader nor the writer has much power once it is published. At a low level, 'Atonement' is a coming-of-age story about a very imaginative girl named Briony. Frustrated and unable to understand the adult's world, she destroys a relationship, and later on her family. In the background there is the WWII, and its effect upon Brittain and its people. But digging depper into the novel we are taken to a higher level, where everything is more sophisticated. McEwan rises very pertinent questions about literature: how reliable is what you are reading? Do you believe in what the writer (anyone, not McEwan specifically) has written? How does he/she know what he/she is talking about? Does he/she have to have experience everything he/she is writing about? This is what makes 'Atonement' so complex and great, in my opinion. In a age of fast-food novels, it is a relief to read such a deep and complex novel in which the writer is not worried about souding cool, more than that, he wants us reader to think. He wants us to doubt everything --even what he has written. In a time when most writers wants to be the owner of the truth, 'Atonement' sheds a light showing that there is no such thing as an universal truth. Everything depends on who is telling, and what effects this person wants to cause in his/her audience. A highly recommended novel to 'advanced' readers, who like to think while they are reading a novel!
Rating: 
Summary: Much ado about nothing
Review: Truly an awful book. It is, by turns, turgidly written and so overwrought as to be unreadable. The characters are uniformly easy either to dislike or to be bored by. The plot is nothing short of silly, including a moronic "surprise" ending that adds nothing at all except to remind you how pointless, shallow, and empty the rest of the book is. The book is so poorly done that I almost suspected McEwan of intentionally carricaturing a certain kind of British novel of manners. A waste of time, money, ink, and paper.
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