Rating: 
Summary: Fatal flaw
Review: "Atonement" is a beautifully written work, possibley the best of McEwen's novels. He's a favorite of mine. However, the defining event in the story, involving a mis-identification of a perpetrator of a criminal act, flawed the otherwise brilliant novel. I found it not only improbable, but impossible, to accept that a police department, even one as probably naive in its techniques as the one in the book, would take the identification of an alleged perpetrator by a pre-pubescent child, who didn't see the perpetrator's face, in the middle of the night, under difficult circumstances, as enough proof, without a corroborating witness, to charge someone with a most serious crime. It's even more improbable that a good criminal defense lawyer wouldn't have torn the witness's testimony to shreds. Nevertheless, the book goes on from this event to its conclusion. Fatally flawed.
Rating: 
Summary: pretentious and boring
Review: If you suffer from insomnia, this is a great drug-free way to go into snooze mode. I just cannot fathom the great reviews, the lofty place on the best-seller lists, and the swooning praise of readers. Everyone in my book club just hated it, we all gave up at at various points in the book and chose something else to read. The lies and imaginings of a spoiled brat are described as some sort of grand "crime." Give me a break. This was truly one of the worst books I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful Novel
Review: After reading this book, I couldn't help but think through everthing that had happened in the story for a long time. The first few chapters go a little slow but it's important in that it sets the scene up for everything else that is to happen and a great deal happens indeed! Once the characters are introduced and the background it set, the story just took off and it was a joy to read. This book makes you go through a rollercoaster ride of emotions, at one point I was just angry, then I was hit with sadness, then tenderness...it's rare for a book to make me recall all these emotions. The narrative flips back and forth describing the story through different characters points of view. I thought this was extremely effective for this type of story where no one person can see the whole of the truth. But there is so much layers to the story that you almost have to see things from different perspectives. As a reader, you are introduced to all of those view points which makes it very exciting to read. The narrative is beautifully written, the scenes are gripping and somehow manages to convey a lot of emotion through simple descriptions. I thoroghly enjoyed the book and it made me think a lot about the choices that were made by each of the characters in the book, and I was amazed at how each of these decisions have affected the lives of the other characters, in good and in bad ways.
Rating:
Summary: A little Salinger, a little Woolf, a little....
Review: Ian McEwan's "Atonement" succeeds on many levels but, in the end, comes up short as a wholly satisfying tale. Whether primarily seen as an unfolding mystery, a sweeping family saga, a novel of manners, or a psychological study - each focus is fuzzed by the piecemeal intrusion of the others. As a result, the full 351 pages never really become more than the sum of its distinct parts. This overall reaction is probably due to great expectations not being met because there are many good things here to appreciate and savor. While I would certainly recommend that friends take it out of the library, I do not think it needs to be added to one's personal collection, a cumulative hobby I've long advocated.Told in three parts (with a necessary epilogue,) the tale revolves around 13-year-old Briony's breathlessly melodramatic lie about the "rape" of a cousin. The longish first part takes us through a single day in 1935 which culminates in the faux crime. The plot result is the imprisonment of her sister Cecelia's beau Robbie. Part Two then fast-forwards five years hence to the British humiliation at Dunkirk which we see through the disjointed perspective of Robbie's battle fatigue. Part Three shows us Briony's passage to nursing school in London and her eventually seeking atonement for her pernicious fabrication years before. The epilogue is barely satisfactory in answering further questions that have been raised in passing. As I say, maybe borrow a copy sometime but don't plan on this being a "must read" for this season at the beach.
Rating: 
Summary: Oh Boy
Review: This is a very well-written, indeed it's a beautifully written, book. The language used just keeps you flowing along through the
story, which is absorbing in its own right. The book presents a tale of misplaced knowledge, of conclusions reached without sufficient
information, and of accusations made which profoundly change the lives of everyone involved. We see guilt, sorrow, venality, heroism,
in fact, almost every emotion runs through this book except the one most needed: forgiveness. The author is to be commended for the
way in which he presents the events unfolding around the main characters, and the sterling use which he makes of our language, turning
the commonplace into something almost profound. You will not be disappointed if you read this work. I predict a literary prize in its
future.
Rating: 
Summary: Yes, great descriptions but a bit labored, no?
Review: I'm not sorrry I plowed through this book, but I sure wouldn't give it a great review. "Atonement" is so crammed with (yes, beautiful) details that I found it claustrophobic and too dense. I wasn't crazy about the way McEwen leapt through time either, didn't register with me as true, not even true, certainly far from the best fiction. I don't recommend buying this. If you must see what all the fuss is about, go to a library. What the fuss is about is his natural talent, obvious hard work and character development. I know that sounds like more than enough but for me it was decidedly less than enough. 2 stars only
Rating: 
Summary: Not Disappointed!
Review: Having heard glowing reviews from so many sources before reading the book, I was a bit apprehensive. So often I wind up being disappointed when things are "built up" and tend to enjoy things more that I expect not to like. However, despite my high expecations, I was not disappointed and thoroughly enjoyed the novel. As advertised, it is incredibly well written. It also manages to flawlessly integrate temporally, geographically, and even thematically distinct characters and story lines. I have not read much of Ian McEwan's earlier works (only Amsterdam, which I enjoyed, but which is not as good as Atonement in my opinion), but after reading this one, I would rank him as one of the few best contemporary authors. Certainly this is one of the best books I have read in the past few years.
Rating:
Summary: A Painter of Pictures
Review: I have great respect for writers who use words in interesting ways, to paint pictures and tell stories from a unique perspective. Ian McEwan is a master, and I enjoyed Atonement although it did drag a bit. I have also found another writer whose words intrigue me. Were Robert Frost or Claude Monet to employ pen or brush to craft an epic love story, Shade of the Maple by Kirk Martin would be the creation. Martin's lyrical prose fuses the drama of The Bridges of Madison County with the emotional weight of The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks. McEwan and Martin provide a fine complement, McEwan dealing with heavier material while Martin soars.
Rating:
Summary: disappointing...
Review: I found this book very disappointing considering its place on various bestseller lists. It takes a very long time to get where it's going and the language does not warrant the wait; neither do the characters. The "unreliable narrator" may be a fictional fad or may be here to stay but this one was a waste of my time. And I really disliike books that contort themselves in the last few pages.
Rating:
Summary: The Rules of the Game
Review: Atonement, Ian McEwan's ninth novel, is split into three very definite phases. The first phase is very much pastoral modernism (by which I mean that it reads like Renoir's La Regle du Jeu rewritten by Virginia Woolf). Briony Tallis, a precocious thirteen year old has composed a play (The Trials of Arabella) for her brother Leon, only the preparations for the performance are disrupted by the arrival of her cousins Lola, Jackson and Pierrot from the abstract North ("refugees," McEwan writes, "from a bitter domestic civil war."). With the play thrown into disarray, Briony sulks in her room - a sulk that allows her to glimpse a very peculiar scene involving her sister Cecilia [taking] off her clothes in the garden before her childhood friend Robbie Turner. The ambivalent feelings stirred in Briony by the soundless scene she witnesses bring the tiny, polite country world crashing down around their ears before the day is out. The middle of the book occurs sometime later, in the midst of the Second World War. Robbie Turner has served the jail time visited upon him as a result of Briony's claims, and now finds himself in France making the perilous journey towards the beaches at Dunkirk. He and Cecilia are in love. She writes to him: "They turned on you, all of them, even my father. When they wrecked your life they wrecked mine. They chose to believe the evidence of a silly, hysterical little girl. In fact, they encouraged her by giving her no room to turn back." Cecilia vows that she will "never want to speak to (Briony) again." Both of the sisters have become nurses but their relationship will never be as it was. The brief coda (that runs to a length of no more than twenty pages) changes all that we have read up this point. It is London, 1999. Briony Tallis is a celebrated novelist, and what we have read has been adapted by her for our consumption. Yes, these events took place, but not as described here. This has been a novel. What truth there has been is outweighed by a tidy neatening of events. "Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love?" she writes. "No-one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel." Her atonement, when it comes, is the attempt to make a better world for the people she was party to the destruction of. And yet, and yet, "how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no-one . . . that can forgive her." What you have, what this successive redrawing of boundaries achieves, is both a novel (there are characters, there is a compelling story, there is vivid writing that peels off the page the way the soldier's bandage peels back to reveal raw brain) and a meta-novel (a discussion of the very idea of what a novel could and should constitute, all of which is both enormously thought-provoking and enormously compelling). While it is untrue to say that McEwan has not written as well elsewhere (Enduring Love, Black Dogs and The Child in Time all spring immediately to mind), there is a certain abstract something to all of this which suggests he has raised his game: Atonement is that rare beast we all look forward to at the beginning of each year: that book which sets the bar for all of the others, that book which says THIS IS A NOVEL, that book which says COMPETE WITH THIS. This is the book that should have won the 2001 Booker Prize.
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