When looking at the story as an overall, it thought it was well written because the author was able to include lots of details with very intense scenes and he used imagery very well as I was able to imagine scenes clearly. I think this story really emphasizes the phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover”. I think this because when I saw the title of the book and looked at it, I thought it was most likely going to be a boring book with content that I wouldn’t understand. But as I began to read it more and more, I started to gain some interest in the book and about the characters. I thought that the character development throughout the story was interesting because I had a feeling that Vasili was going to have a change of heart and he did. I did find it shocking though that at the end of the book Tolstoy had Vasili die and have Nikita stay alive. It was an ending that surprised me and something that I didn’t expect. Something that I did dislike about the book was that the grammar and some of the word choices were hard to understand. I found that on some sentences I was confused on what Tolstoy was trying to indicate and they seemed backwards, or words were out of place. But that is how old English was and how they wrote. All in all, I liked the story as I thought the plot was interesting as well as the character involvement.