Instruct: Classify a given review into positive or negative sentiment.
Query: A good, if somewhat wordy, tragedy of life at sea

Melville's Billy Budd is, unlike Moby Dick, thankfully short. Despite its brevity, Melville still becomes wordy at times. His plot and characters are quite interesting but the book can become tiresome after twenty or thirty pages. My advice would be to read this in school, the analysis of it is more interesting than the reading.