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Average Customer Rating:

Jeweler's Eye

Customer Rating:

With meticulous precision, Ian McEwan examines the wedding night of an innocent couple, who marry in 1962 and spend their first night alone together at a hotel on Chesil Beach. In always elegant prose, McEwan displays his great gift for describing the particular and making it universal. In this case, he turns his jeweler's eye on the misunderstandings between a young man and young woman, deeply in love and deeply inhibited. Recommended for anyone who has ever loved or hoped to love.

Anticlimactic	Customer Rating:
This book would have made a good short story. The plot was too weak and too drawn out for a full length novel. I was disappointed in this book.

Don't Let Your Hubris Be Your Hamartia

Customer Rating:

This book says: Your life can change in one moment. One bad decision, one hour of inflated pride or of deflated self-confidence, and your way may be lost, your course derailed, and you may not be smart enough or brave enough to fix it when you should. This book is poetic, brief, heart-wrenching. You will read it overnight. McEwan's seamless movement through time - taking you from Point A (a second-by-millisecond play-by-play of the couples first and foiled attempt at making love) to Point B (a condensed reflection on the monotony of their regular and separate lives, two decades later) - accentuates the way memories of some painful, scary, awkward, unprecedented seconds (spent trying to navigate romance, sex, and love) last a lifetime, while the memories of the years between such episodes (spent naviating the more predictable terrain of career changes, aging, and self-improvement) blur together and dissolve, lose their shape and form, are boiled down into resumes instead of love letters. This book says: Don't let pride, fear, or practicality ruin your shot at true love. Just. Don't. Do. It.

True to Ian McEwan's form...a beautiful story

Customer Rating:

I finished this beautiful story in one afternoon. I have read several of Ian McEwan's books and have loved every single one. He has this uncanny knack of drawing you into every agonizing situation, causing you to feel exactly what the character is feeling. Much like Atonement, the last few pages make your stomach turn and a lump gather in your throat. Ian McEwan is writing genius personified, proven again in this wonderful novel.

The Tragedy of Assumptions, Especially in Love

Customer Rating:

I read this book in one sitting. This book takes place in the early 1960's before the time of free love. The tragedy is that two young people know little of the ways of love and sex. Their attempt to connect on their wedding night is a disaster and haunts them for the rest of their lives, destroying a part of each of them. The young woman, idealizing love but disgusted by the act of it, the bodily fluids, the touching of intimate parts and caresses, rejects her young husband on their honeymoon night. He is appalled, for he thinks that he is loving her, giving her his body and his heart, touching her skin with the intimacy of their love. She runs away, completely disgusted about 'sex'. He runs after her but their angry words leave both severed from the other. He soothes himself in multiple and unsatisfying relations for the rest of his life. She, being a musician and a composer, composes a piece for him. He never enters a concert hall and the music never reaches the ears to which they were intended. On Chesil Beach is a rich and tragic story of different expectations, ignorance, and fear. The flip side of fear can be anger since it is safer to express anger than hurt. The hurt that occurs in this book is powerful and lasting. It is both mythical and common happening to many people as they try to connect with others and end up with the wrong expectations and assumptions that lead them apart rather than to an intimacy and love they had hoped for.