"To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

Synopsis: The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it. To Kill A Mockingbird became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.
Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior—to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story, by a young Alabama woman, claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.


My review: I knew there was a court case involved and that the overall theme was black-white relations in the South.  And I knew it was controversial...otherwise it wouldn't have been on the banned books list.  So whenever you hear people talk about it, that's what they talk about.  Having never read the book, the one thing that deeply surprised me was how funny the first 150 pages were; my favourite is when Scout finds the gum.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  I would definitely recommend this book and not solely based on the main theme but on the writing quality and how easily it evokes life in that era.  It was so easy to vividly imagine it all, as if you were actually there.

I loved the main characters so much.  I most love the feisty tomboy of Scout; the honest, fair, and upstanding Atticus; the exuberant and somewhat romantic Dill; and even the enigmatic character of Boo Radley.  I sympathized with Jem and his struggles between boyhood and the beginnings of his loss of childhood innocence.

Prejudice and racism are things I haven't had to struggle with much myself (except on the receiving end).  I firmly believe that all humans should be treated equally, that every human deserves the same rights regardless of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, body size, etc.  My own personal discrimination, though, is people with mental disabilities: they make me uncomfortable and I don't know why, but they are still unique individuals due the same rights as everyone else.  Just because someone is different doesn't mean they don't deserve respect and compassion.

Although the major theme in this book is prejudice, I find there is also the theme of being accused of and convicted for something you didn't do.  And not just the major instance of Tom Robinson/Mayella Ewell but also in Scout/Francis at christmas.  This is an issue that I have personal experience with.  I am more familiar with the prejudice of boys vs girls and it is the more prevalent version I've seen in my reading life.  Just as a white person's word was taken over a black person's regardless of lack of evidence, a boy's word was/is taken over a girl's.  I am in no way downplaying the seriousness of prejudice in any way, I'm just making a comparison.  Thankfully, in today's society, both prejudices are far weaker than they have historically been.  I may be naive in some ways but I am not naive enough to say that those prejudices no longer exist.

I generally move from book to book.  But this book was so rich and moving that I had to take a break for a while as I let the book soak in.

"If the remainder of the school year ere as fraught with drama as the first day, perhaps it would be mildly entertaining, but the prospect of spending nine months refraining from reading and writing made me think of running away."

"If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other?  If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other?"

Read on,
Paula