Here is a review and synopsis of the short story Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne based upon a general recollection of what the story is about and the very first sentence of it.

The story begins, "Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street of Salem village; but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife." And here we reach the climax of the story, a racy kiss in the glow of the afternoon sunlight, because the rest of its eleven pages consist of Young Goodman Brown walking through the woods and reacting very, very slightly to devils and the Devil and also devilish thoughts and sounds and shadows and twigs and so on. Hawthorne loved the Devil and wrote about him, specifically his being in the woods, in most of his stories, but that doesn't mean that he was incapable of branching out. For instance, in The Scarlet Letter, I believe he calls the woods 'the forest' a few times, and this 'forest' doesn't necessarily contain the Devil, just an overall, unspecific evil in which Hester Prynne often finds a refuge from the utterly boring remainder of her own story.

Unfortunately, we do not find such a dynamic and enthralling character as Prynne in Young Goodman Brown, rather, we get Young Goodman Brown, contractible to simply Goodman Brown. Young Goodman Brown has a wife named Faith and one of his outstanding traits is that he likes very much things that are good but does not at all like things that are evil, things such as devils. This is standard behavior for a Puritan lad; I know because I have read other works by Hawthorne and they are all about Puritan lads and all of them act in this manner. Because of Goodman Brown's strong and controversial views on good and evil things, it is almost too much for him to bear when he finds out that many of the things that he thought were good are in fact evil. Apparently all the townspeople of Salem gather at night to perform witchery or devilry or Devilry; people that Goodman Brown had thought to be, well, good.

Young Goodman Brown makes this discovery in the woods.

Now at this point I think something happens to his wife and he shouts "I have lost my Faith" which has a hidden double meaning that Hawthorne leaves the reader to decipher (hint: Faith = faith?). Also, you should probably keep in mind that reading this story is excruciatingly boring throughout, just to get a better idea of the tone Hawthorne was trying to create with this piece. In case you can't accurately picture it, that tone is "impossible to read."

I'm sure something else happens in Young Goodman Brown but I am certainly not going to leaf through the pages again just to find out. Come to think of it, nothing else happens in this story. I was wrong. Mr. Brown walks through the woods and sells his soul to the Devil or something; Hawthorne, you've done it again.

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I would recommend Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown to readers ages 15 and up, who can probably fashion rolling paper from the pages.