Rating: 
Summary: Give it some time
Review: If you can get through the first 100 pages about the 13 year-old, you will love this book - don't give up.
McEwan spends way too much time establishing Briony's personality early on. Once Book 1 is over, the novel pics up and ends in a way that will touch you and keep you thinking for a long time.
Rating:
Summary: Really Like It
Review: If you enjoyed Kaitlyn Stewarts "Nightmares Echo" and Jackson Tippet McCrae's "Bark of Dogwood" you should enjoy "Atonement." It is an excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: Melodrama or tragedy? It's in the eye of the beholder
Review: Reviewing ATONEMENT is tricky. Whether you want to explain why it is wonderful or why you don't admire it, you can easily run afoul of the prime directive of speaking about a book to someone who has yet to read it: you aren't supposed to give away the surprises. This book is rigged with surprises.What can be said about the story: it begins in 1935, with one fateful weekend at an affluent country house in England where the younger generation runs from ages 9 to 25, and the matriarch is ineffectually absorbed in migraines and the father is absent. The younger children, led by the precocious Briony, a budding 13-year-old playwright, are putting on a morality play for the young adults, about love and attraction and things they about which the playwright and actors really haven't a clue. Meanwhile, the young adults are engaging in all those things. The play gets called off, but Briony continues to impose her vision of reality of these things, and she ends up affecting adult lives dramatically. The story then moves forward to the war years and finally to the present (1999). This book earned orgasmic praise from America's most estimable literary critics. What is good about it? The sentences are beautifully rendered. The characters are drawn knowingly, honestly conceived. Period detail is well done. The description of a gifted young writer is very true, and it is not spoiling anything to say that one of the major themes better handled by McEwan is the nature of being a writer. But . . . . I have some negatives but that would require spoiling surprises. I can say that because the sentences are so very fluid, the reader overruns the plodding action constantly. That and while I thought most of the motivations and actions were quite credible, particularly in the 1935 section, the guiding emotion at the center of the book does not seem so real. For the most part, this story belongs to BBC/Masterpiece Theater melodrama.
Rating: 
Summary: Masterpiece Indeed
Review: The mere title suggests that Atonement is a book with weighty themes, and in that, novelist Ian McEwan does not fail to deliver. Yet for all its seriousness, Atonement escapes the snares that befall so many stories of its ilk; it is unerringly told without being heavy-handed. Throughout the work, McEwan fills the story with true soul and humanity. Atonement opens with Briony, the thirteen-year-old youngest daughter in an upper class British family. A budding writer, the girl is preparing to put on a play for her older brother's visit home. Yet as one misfortune after another dooms her production, the young protagonist turns her imagination to an innocent occurrence that she damningly misreads. Her sister's plunge into a fountain to retrieve a vase reads as something sinister in the eyes of the would-be novelist, and her story telling lands her sister's lover in prison. The second half of the story opens as that boy, Robbie, is released from jail only to land himself in the routed British Army retreating toward Dunkirk. Robbie's terror and the desperation to return to the woman he loves is wonderfully transcribed and the sympathy the reader feels for young soldier burns true. Meanwhile, Briony, now a nurse, has realized the true nature of her error, and she greatly wishes to reverse her actions. Yet for all her realization, the girl can neither unsay her words in court nor manage to persuade Robbie to forgive her. The final chapter of the book takes place in 1999 as an aging Briony reveals that the novel is her final attempt to tell the truth and atone for her actions. The novel has all the post-modern feel of an artist commenting on the false nature of his work, but in truth, this is an older type of story---one about people attempting to live very real lives---and that is part of what makes it remarkable.
Rating:
Summary: A prose poem
Review: This is an amazing read by a masterful writer. You get the sense that every line was crafted to perfection. It is poetry to the eyes and imagination.
Rating:
Summary: Masterful
Review: This novel is one of the best I have read in years. By the end, you will feel the love, passion, longing, pain, and agonizing regret of "if only" right along with the beautifully developed characters.
Rating:
Summary: That Girl, That Chapter
Review: This was my second book by McEwan, the first being Amsterdam, which I enjoyed for its topic more than its precision. What one chapter led me to believe all vanished in its last sentence. For that alone it is worth the read. However, the book in its entirety is brilliant, with Briony becoming legendary in her childhood event and its lifelong reprecussions. Read this and ask for forgiveness, or at least write for forgiveness.
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