I must start by saying I was hooked from the start:

I’ve confessed to everything and I’d like to be hanged.

Now, if you please.

I don’t mean to be difficult, but I can’t bear to tell my story. . . . Nothing in my story will absolve me of guilt. It will only prove what I’ve already told you, which is that I’m wicked. . . . But this isn’t a proper story, and I’m telling you, I ought to be hanged.

What could Briony, a seventeen-year-old daughter of a village clergyman in the early twentieth-century English countryside, have done to hate herself so, to have such a desperately wicked image of herself that she publicly wished for immediate death? I wanted to know, and as I read I started encountering little trickles of information mixed into the narrative: she banged her twin sister’s head in a jealous fit when they were little, leaving Rose permanently abnormal and slow, she broke her stepmother’s back in another fit of rage, flooded the Parsonage, and burned down their library, taking her beloved collection of handwritten stories with them. Oh, and most importantly, she’s been hiding for years the fact that she’s a witch.

I mustn’t get back to thinking of myself as a princess, or wolfgirl. All the silly things I used to imagine. Stepmother was right. It doesn’t matter that you look like a princess on the outside. You’re a witch on the inside and nothing will change that. It’s best not to look at yourself at all. . . .

I hate myself.

You must take care of Rose. Stepmother had said that again and again. Take care of Rose. And I had promised.

I’d learned how to do it. I’d learned I had to hate myself.

I crashed into the kitchen. The cupboard door was ajar.

When you hate yourself, you don’t neglect your responsibilities. When you hate yourself, you never forget what you did.

I’d even forgotten about Rose’s cough. How little it took, two bright eyes and a couple of paper clips. What if it’s the swamp cough and she dies, Briony? How will those bright eyes look then?

Let’s review the rules, Briony: What, above all, mustn’t you forget?

You mustn’t forget to hate yourself.

The problem, it seems, is that Briony is having trouble remembering to hate herself because of a new distraction: Eldric, owner of those two bright eyes, twenty-two-year-old handsome, trouble-making son of an industrialist, and boarder at Briony’s house. He disrupts her simple, cloistered world with a desire for friendship, adventure, and mischief. Also, Eldric’s father is in town to drain the local swamp, which has made the Boggy Mun, the swamp spirit, lash out by infecting many of the town’s youth with fatal swamp cough. Now Briony, who desires life despite her self-hatred, must decide if she’s willing to bargain with the Boggy Mun to save Rose’s life, which will most likely mean exposing herself as a witch and facing the gallows.

Briony is an exquisitely real narrator, one whom we’re not sure we can trust because of her all too tangible and realistic self-loathing, and unraveling the mystery of her narrative and tortured psyche is an excellent reading experience. Not always a fun one, but excellent nevertheless. A great mix of voice, character, story, and emotion.