" This book started out with so much promise, it makes me sad that it ended up falling so short of the mark. It began with some surprisingly modern themes, but did very little to make good use of them. The whole story is told first-person by a very unlikable and unreliable narrator, an elitist young man who thinks of himself as being very clever (although he loses every intellectual debate he opens his mouth in) and heroic (although he becomes very ill almost immediately and is constantly plagued by bouts of jealousy and self-pity). Of course, Hawthorne wrote him in such an unflattering light intentionally, but I still prefer my main characters to be a bit more dynamic. The story itself begins like an intellectual exercise, morphs into a mystery of sorts, and then ends like a bad soap opera. Oh, and the story relies heavily on coincidence to move itself forward because of the narrator's disinclination to do anything proactive. This being Hawthorne, there are some beautifully written passages to be found here, but definitely don't go into this expecting the same degree of genius as The Scarlet Letter. "
— John, 2/19/2014