C Wyer

A LOVE STORY IN PURE-ITANICAL FORM! The Scarlet Letter: A Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a deeply emotional and thought-provoking historical fiction novel about the nature of sin and the danger of revenge. I would have given this book five stars, but I can’t because I feel like Hawthorne rushes his ending and wraps all of the character’s stories up too quickly. Hawthorne’s writing style gets the reader so immersed in the plight of his characters, that when one reads the ending, it just doesn’t seem as deep and well-written as the rest of the novel. Within a scant six pages of the last chapter, Hawthorne kills off the main antagonist (Roger Chillingworth), has Hester’s child, Pearl, disappear without giving an explanation to what happened to her, then fast-forwards across decades of time and kills off the main protagonist, Hester Prynne. The story ends with a description of Hester’s gravestone. It all seems a bit rushed, like Hawthorne was limiting himself to 24 chapters and had to squeeze everything else he wanted to write outside of the main story into the last one. The story is gripping, the characters are well-written, but the story is a slow-burn and takes a long-winded, exhausting thirty-page prologue plus about ten chapters before Hawthorne gets the story moving along. On an unrelated side note, words like “bosom” and “ignominy” are also used a bit excessively throughout the book. I feel like Hawthorne could have done a better job finding alternative synonyms so that his writing style doesn't feel so repetitive. All in all, even with the things that annoyed me, The Scarlet Letter is an enjoyable novel.