What I’ve been reading lately…Atonement by Ian McEwan

I’m going to preface this review by stating the initial sole draw to read this book was the movie made from it was starring Kiera Knightley whom I absolutely adore. What prompted me to move forward with reading it was my twenty-year-old son watching the movie and telling me I HAD to watch it. He is the harshest movie critic I have ever encountered and I took it as very high praise. So of course I decided to go ahead and read the book before I’d consider watching the movie. I had actually bought a used copy of the book about four years prior so it was ready and waiting for me to jump into.

Without creating any spoilers, I will say you will have to be your own judge as to how satisfying or not you find the ending to be. I’m not gonna lie, it was a hard pill for me to swallow. I’m not one of those people who wants everything to have a happy ending because that’s just boring and not how real life works, but I was expecting a little more satisfaction. That being said, the writing is wonderful and creates an opportunity for introspection into our own beliefs on what atonement and forgiveness mean for us both when we are the one who needs to atone or the one who needs to forgive.

We begin our journey by living through one fateful day in the lives of the Tallis family. There are many life-changing events that occur on this one day that determine the future of our three main characters for the rest of their lives. Briony Tallis is a precocious thirteen-year-old girl with a very wild imagination who dreams of becoming a writer. She is on the cusp of adolescence, too naive to understand the complicated entanglements of the newborn love developing between her sister, Cecilia, and Robbie, the son of a servant for the family who has lived on the property since he was a young boy and whom Briony has known all her life. Through two unfortunate series of events, she witnesses the start of that relationship in a way that leads her to believe something sinister has happened. When something sinister really does happen later in the evening, she uses that misconstrued interpretation of events to set something in motion that will ruin the life of an innocent man and leave forever free a guilty one.

Buy or Borrow?

This one was a little bit of a tough call for me but I’m going to say Borrow. My reason for this is the book is so intense there is no real need for a reread. And if perchance you do want to come back to it many years later, you can check it out for free at your local library. There are certain books that leave a hard mark on your heart. What I mean is that, while you thoroughly enjoyed reading the story, it was so intense you don’t necessarily ever want to relive it again.

Where can I get this deeply thoughtful book, you may ask?

Find a hard copy in your local library in the Non-Fiction section (IBSN 978-0-307-38715-8). In my area, Stanislaus County in Modesto, California, you can download the Library app and get everything in a one-stop shop. I cannot say enough about how great this app is for really taking full advantage of everything our local libraries have to offer.

Get the audiobook. If your local library uses apps like Cloud Library or Hoopla, you can connect that app to your library card and check out the Audiobook for FREE! 

You can download the book through Audible which is subscription based. They offer a free seven day trail period and you can also purchase individual books through the app if you prefer not to have a subscription service. 

You can also buy the eBook through Apple Books or again, you can also get it FREE from your local library if they use Cloud Library or Hoopla! 

You can buy it on Amazon or at Barnes & Noble.

Tasty little nuggets…

Here is a little taste of what you can find in this harrowing novel by Ian McEwan. He is a master wordsmith as shown below in an excerpt involving thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis.

“At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write. What she wanted was to be lost to the unfolding of an irresistible idea, to see the black thread spooling out from the end of her scratchy silver nib and coiling into words. But how to do justice to the changes that had made her into a real writer at last, and to her chaotic swarm of impressions, and to the disgust and fascination she felt?” (McEwan, 2002. p 108)

“…Pen in hand, she stared across the room toward her hard-faced dolls, the estranged companions of a childhood she considered closed. It was a chilly sensation, growing up.” (McEwan, 2002. p 109)

I hope you’ll consider giving this book a chance. If you do, I encourage you to ask yourself if you were in the wrong would you try to atone for your sins or if you were the one wronged in that way, could you forgive?