joelawrence 's review for:

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The book's marketed as a romance, but it's a satire. Hester falls in love with the pastor and when her husband (yeah, she was married) shows up out of the woods, disfigured and destitute, she basically tells him to shove it.

It's meant to show that the puritan church's ways were dishonest and destructive.

Take that, Cotton Mather.

Edit: skip the "customs house" chapter at the start. It's laboriously bad and inessential.