I gotta say, Atonement was an interesting book and I liked it more than I thought I would. The ending twist was still powerful even though I knew it was coming since I had already seen the movie. The main character is Briony - a young teenage girl a few years before WWII. One day she unwittingly witnesses a couple of events between her older sister and a young man named Robbie, and her active imagination misinterprets what actually happened. This later leads her to mistakenly and somewhat knowingly accuse Robbie falsely of a crime. The story then picks up during WWII and we see that after serving his time in prison Robbie is fighting in the war and Briony has become a nurse helping the wounded. The book then ends with Briony as an old woman writing a book about her experience.Overall I enjoyed the book and thought McEwan's style was reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's but with actual narrative drive that made me want to find out what would happen next. The only sequence that took me out of the story was when Briony receives a letter from a publisher that critiques a story of hers that was apparently "the first draft" of the first part of the book that ends before Briony commits her crime. It seemed kind of weird to suddenly have bit of a 'meta' moment in the middle of this story. Anyway, I'll give this one an A.
Also it mentions Emma.
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