I read this book after having seen the movie. The intimate, personal nature of the community in which the events occurred drew me in and I appreciated the author's descriptive passages. I learned quite a bit from the author's personalization of events that had happened
…more before my time. It made them seem more vivid and real to me.
The suspenseful nature of the plot also helped keep me interested. It's not easy for an author to balance the different perspectives of the characters in a story without portraying people as 'good guys' and 'bad guys' but the author made me feel that his characters were human, fallible, and emotionally vulnerable by revealing their inner thoughts without revealing too much about the eventual outcome.
In public school, I didn't enjoy history because I had teachers who never went beyond making us memorize names and dates. I would have enjoyed the subject much more if I had been encouraged to read books like this story of the human heart wrapped within the framework of historical events.
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