I liked it more than I thought I would: it's less stoic suffering than i had anticipated. Overall, the characters were a lot nicer to Hester than I thought they'd be and it was actually a pretty sweet story. However, the 40 page narrator introduction is extremely unecessary. It has nothing to do with the story and doesn't even come back after the story to wrap itself up - just complete self-indulgence for the first 1/5 of the book.