I FINISH THIS FREAKING BOOK IN 3 DAYS, PHEW! 
 A lot of people complained about the novel's long-winded passage that seems to lead to nowhere but confusion, and I understand that. There are times which I finish a sentence and had no idea what the heck is going on. But my two-stars rating does not base purely on the prose. 
 In my book-reading years, I have read convoluted book, and I do enjoy some of them. As long as the prose is mesmerizing and not too repetitive and actually engage your attention without bore you, then kudo! But The Scarlet Letter had failed miserably on all criteria. In fact, in trying to hard to be didactic and all-symbolism-holiness, it had sacrificed a great amount of space for character development and plot. 
 PLOT, PLOT, PLOT! 
 20 pages. Yeah. If The Scarlet Letter expunge all redundant sentences, it will fit perfectly into 20 pages. I-no-kidding-you. 
 Had you ever seen a whole long paragraph discussing nothing but the soil and the trees? Then welcome to the Scarlet Letter. Nathaniel Hawthorne is a real virtuoso in this aspect. In fact, it strike me that 99% of this book does nothing but describing random objects and try to twist them into linking with the scarlet letter. 
 "Behold, there comes a meteoroid in a shape of an A" 
 "Behold, the scarlet letter seem to create a shield..." 
 "Behold, the scarlet letter throb..." 
 Yeah, whatever, I get it, the scarlet letter is almighty. 
 PSYCHOLOGICAL MELODRAMA + LENGTHY CHARACTER DESCRIPTION! 
 One of the thing I hate most about this book is its utterly, superficial, not-really-realistic psychological trauma portrayal of all the characters. Nathaniel kept going on how elfish Pearl is, how melancholy Arthur is, how strong Hester is, how evil Roger is... You get the idea. And he do it so frequently you feel like being spoon-fed by words without space in between for discovery. 
 A book shows but not tells. 
 Hello, basic rule here! 
 An author should be able to vividly portray his character, but left some space for the readers to fantasize. 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne never does that. 
 All through the pages, I felt like he was writing and saying to himself simultaneously, 
 "Look what I did there? Another symbolism. Oh, how sagacious!" 
 His excessive uses of convoluted words cut of the conciseness of the plot. It left an impression of a mumbo-jumbo containing thousand difficult words throw together but not strongly string. 
 But, I can tell he is exceptionally passionate and devoted to his work. He had spent time meticulously looking up words in thesaurus to stuff into the pages. I don't blame him. I only blame the American government for making this book mandatory. Thus I will give it two solid stars. There are parts that I remember liking. 
 Peace!