A real masterpiece of American literature. The story is set in a puritan land where a woman has born an illegitimate child. She is forced then to wear a scarlet letter 'A' as a sign of a punishment for her adultery. The character portrays are delightfully structured, and the whole story analyzes the weaknesses, strengths, motivations of book's main characters. It may seem that it is not relevant to recent history and our times, but the beauty of this book lies also in its uniqueness and social insight into that time reality. But is it really so different? Context, setting and we are changing constantly but some social schema behavior stays the same. For me this is the universal feature and that's why it is worth to read this very book.