The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The book boils down to Hester Prynne being marked an adulteress and being forced to wear a scarlet covered letter A on her shirt. What we get is a story of a woman trying to live in a puritan world while dealing with inner conflicts as well as being just shy of shunned from society while attempting to take care of her daughter.

I had to read this book my junior year of high school. At the time I found it pretty boring but I understood its importance in literary history. It has been about 12 years since reading it and have considered doing so again.

Overall it isn't a bad story and worth reading at least once. If you can get past Hawthorne's writing style your over the biggest challenge in finishing this story. At times it feels as though thoughts will continue forever and that you will never come to an end. Not many books are written like this anymore and people now find this harder to deal with likely due to the ever decreasing attention span.

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