Atonement, Ian McEwan

This time, I chose to read a book written by an author that I was familiar with. The name of the book is Atonement, by Ian McEwan.

Firstly, we start off with the Tallis family, they are an upper class family. The main character of the story is Briony Tallis, who is the youngest out of the three daughters. They are expecting a visit from their cousins, Jackson, Pierrot and Lola who are staying with them because of their parent's divorce.
The story really starts when Briony sees what her sister Cecelia, and her childhood friend, Robby Turner, are doing together.
Briony processes these events as something very usual because she is an imaginative 13-year old that does not understand these things yet. She then decides that Robbie is a lunatic which results in the twins running away. When the family goes out to look for them, Briony finds here sister Lola that has just been sexually abused and is convinced that is guilty. She tells the police and he is put in prison but his mother and Cecilia are on his side and protest for him not to go to prison.
The next part of the story is 5 years ahead of time, when Robbie is released from prison and has to join the British Expeditionary Force fighting in France against the Nazis. He gets wounded and is only kept going because of Cecilia's letters.
Briony then realises that it wasn't Robbie that sexually abused her sister Lola and feels very guilty about it so she decides not to go and study in Cambridge but to become a training nurse. Her other sister Lola and Paul get married and Briony suspects that it was him that raped Lola, however she does nothing to stop the marriage.
One day, she decides to go and visit her sister, Cecilia and sees Robbie in the apartment and she was surprised that he is still alive. She tried to ask for forgiveness but they both refuse. Robbie and Cecilia give Briony a list of things that she can do to help clear Robbie's name and she agreed to do them.

At the end, we figure out that Briony is actually the author of the book and she was able to write the parts of the war because of the letters and a pen-pal correspondence with a corporal that was Robbie's friend. She was 77 years old at this point in the book. The final twist is that she mad sup the part about her going to see Robbie and Cecilia in London and that they both died in the war. She says that she just wanted to let their love last into the final pages of the book and that would be her fins atonement to them.

Briony is the main character and the story is told through her eyes. She is the one that makes all the plot twists in the book. The story starts off when she is only 13 years old and when we first meet her, we perceive her as a very imaginative and creative young girl as she has already managed to write her first play.
She first starts to lose her innocence when she misunderstands the situation between her older sister and Robbie. She obviously did not seem to understand adult behaviour and took it for something bad and vile.

I really enjoyed this book because I had no idea what was going to happen at the end of the book, it was a complete turn. The war and her not seeing Robbie and Cecilia again was something that we would not have expected from when we read the first chapter.
I also really liked how we found out at the end that Briony herself was the author of the book because then we reflect back on everything that happened in the book and it all makes sense. Throughout the book, we would have never guessed that Briony was the author because we had no clues.

Ian McEwan more or less wrote Atonement in a similar style to Black Dogs. The sentences and language that he uses are similar in both books. I really like his book and stories because they always have an amazing plot twist at the end. I would like to read more of his books to see what other kind of stories he writes.