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| Plot Summary of Atonement |
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"In the summer of 1935 Briony Tallis, a 13-year-old from a well-to-do English family, is a budding writer. She hopes to have her cousins Lola and the twins Jackson and Pierrot enact a play of her devising during a family get-together, but the cast is hopeless. During the day, however, she spies a servant's son, Robbie Turner, apparently making her older sister Cecilia strip, and comes upon an obscene love letter he has written her. Briony's fertile imagination conjures all sorts of awful things, and when her cousin Lola is raped, our heroine is pretty sure she saw Robbie do it. He is sent to prison, much over Cecilia's protests, gets out early to fight in France where he is caught up in the confusion of the retreat at Dunkirk, and over the years matters sort out more or less between the estranged family members. McEwan's previous book, _Amsterdam_, won Britain's Booker prize, and he almost snagged it again for this majestic and measured work of creeping menace about the pleasures, pains, and dangers of writing, the difficulty of controlling what other people make of your writing, and the vagaries of memory and history."
David Loftus, Resident Scholar
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"The main character is a girl of around 13 years of age, with the name of Briony. she is a writer with a creative imagination, which eventually gets her sisters lover locked in jail and he therefore has to become part of the infantry, and fight in World War II. Briony's statement - she believed Robbie was raping her sister, and therefore tries to protect her - is what put Robbie in jail, and contributed to his death at Dunkirk. Briony spends the rest of her life trying to atone for this mistake.
One of the worst books I have ever read: it is non sensical and lacks true substance. The books flashbacks make it unclear as to what is happening and most of the book is spent backpeddling to catch up with what happened. Definitely a book that is easy to put down."
Nicholas Marini, Resident Scholar
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| Review Analysis of Atonement |
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Our unique search engine provides a wealth of detail about books by breaking them down into many different literary elements, all of which are searchable (click here).
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Ratings are on a 1-10 scale (Low to High)
Plot
Tone of book?
- very sensitive (sigh)
- thoughtful
Time/era of story
- 1930's-1950's
Romance/Romance Problems
Yes
Kind of romance:
- fighting matchbreaker (parents/authorities)
Kind of sex:
- rape
Is this an adult or child's book?
- Adult or Young Adult Book
Taboo sex story?
Yes
Lover is
- a criminal (possibly)
Main Character
Gender
- Female
Profession/status:
- writer
Age:
- a teen
Eccentric/Mental
Yes
Eccentric:
- eccentric
Is this an ordinary person caught up in events?
Yes
Ethnicity/Nationality
- British
How sensitive is this character?
- soggy whimpering jelly muffin
- middling sensitive to others' feelings
Sense of humor
- Mostly serious with occasional humor
Intelligence
- Average intelligence
- Smarter than most other characters
Physique
- average physique
Main Adversary
Identity:
- Male
Age:
- 20's-30's
Profession/status:
- infantry soldier
How much of work is main antagonist actually present in:
- a moderate amount
How sensitive is this character?
- sensitive to others' feelings
- middling sensitive to others' feelings
Sense of humor
- Cynical sense of humor
- Mostly serious with occasional humor
Intelligence
- Average intelligence
- Smarter than most other characters
Physique
- average physique
Setting
How much descriptions of surroundings?
- 4 (a fair amount)
Europe
Yes
European country:
- England/UK
- France
Misc setting
- fancy mansion
Style
Person
- mostly 3rd
Accounts of torture and death?
- moderately detailed references to deaths
Sex in book?
Yes
What kind of sex:
- vague references
- descript of kissing
- touching of anatomy
- licking
- descript. of female anat. (the big B's)
- descript. of female anat. (the big V)
- rape/molest (yeech!)
Unusual Style:
- a lot of flashback and forwards
- a lot of stream of consciousness
Amount of dialog
- roughly even amounts of descript and dialog
- significantly more descript than dialog
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Note: the views expressed here are only those of the reviewer(s). | |
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