A review by toad_maiden
Mosses from an Old Manse and other stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne

2.0

Meh. I like Hawthorne on a good day, and some of his best known stories ("The Artist of the Beautiful", "The Birthmark", "Young Goodman Brown") are collected here. There were also a few new delights for me: I loved "Roger Malvin's Burial"and "The Old Manse". However, there is no mistaking that he is a clumsy allegorist at times. "Egotism; or, the Bosom Serpent", "A Select Party", and "The Christmas Banquet" are particularly painful. Also, his essay-musings contained here read as incredibly self-indulgent, rather than poetic--I ended up skipping through many of them. I think he is at his best when tempering his moralizing tendencies with a healthy dose of spookiness, and when he is writing about the New English history and culture in a critical, rather than an aggrandizing, way. This volume is worth picking through, but not worth reading cover-to-cover.