While the title The Scarlet Letter itself makes the novel sound exciting, the plot is really nothing more that endless chapters of description and emotional trauma. The climax of the story really only hits in chapter 23 (there are 24 chapters in the novel) and the rising actions that led to it only began two or fewer chapters before that. The novel focuses on Hester Prynne, a woman who committed adultery and is shunned by her village. The plot is filled with nothing more than alternating chapters describing each character. The character description might not have been so bad, had the characters been even remotely interesting, but they all have no personality development and are dull to read about. The chapters are filled with run-on sentences stuffed with a thesaurus of adjectives and adverbs that are completely unnecessary. I doubt that there are any non-dialogue sentences in the entire novel that are fewer than twenty words long. The sheer absence of sentence diversity was enough to put me to sleep. I understand that the novel was written over a century ago, but that doesn’t make the dialogue any more enjoyable to read now. There is an overwhelming amount of “Thou”, “Thee”, “Thine” which make it sound like a much less entertaining Shakespearean play. I can proudly say that my favorite part of reading this book was finishing it.