To Kill a Mockingbird

Customer Reviews

What a read!

In a recent writing assignment, my son noted:

My mom chose Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird as our family book club's March book. I flipped through, saw the number of pages, and thought, "Boring!" Later that night, I read the first page and discovered that the main character's brother was about my age and wanted to play football and own an air rifle. Then, a few days later, I continued reading and even though I found the writing a little "fancy," I was finally able to find the beauty of Lee's book - it's a pretty "grown-up" story, but it's seen through the eyes of kids like me. That makes hard subjects easier to understand, which makes the book so much more interesting.

The novel is told from a young girl's perspective. Because the theme of racism, the subject of rape, and the idea of injustice are a little "over the top" - even for bright readers -Lee chose a young narrator to tell the story of a black man falsely accused of raping a young white woman and one man's fight to free him. If the story had been told by an adult, readers would have to suffer through the unnecessary chit-chat, opinions, and worries of that perspective. Seeing Maycomb County through Scout's innocent eyes, however, prevents this "masterpiece of American literature" from being an "I-had-to-read-it" sort of book.

Scout, her brother Jem, and their father form one of many families of Maycomb County, Alabama. In that southern state during the Great Depression, "[t]here was no hurry for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy, and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County." As the novel begins, Scout is six and about to start school, where she will be criticized for coming to class already knowing how to read and write. Her young teacher scolds Scout: "Now you tell your father not to teach you anymore. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage." (p. 17) Jem, a fifth-grader, allows his sister to join him in many of his adventures, including his plans with Dill to make Boo Radley come out. But he thinks Scout "is getting more like a girl every day." (p. 52) The children's father, Atticus Finch, is a state legislator and one of the county's leading lawyers. He is selected to defend Tom Robinson, a Negro accused of rape.

Racism still exists today, but the problems don't compare to those described in To Kill a Mocking Bird. The main problem seems to be that Negroes are considered the least human of four kinds of people. As Jem tells Scout, "There's four kinds of folks in the world. There's the ordinary kind like us and the neighbors, there's the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the Negroes." (p. 226) To make the point about Negroes being somehow less important than other folks, the author tells Tom's story. He is a Negro whose left arm is stripped of muscle from a childhood accident. He stops to help nineteen-year-old Mayella Ewell with several chores because, as Tom admits at his trial, "I felt right sorry for her, she seemed to try more'n the rest of 'em" - referring to her family, who gathers their supplies from the nearby dump and whose father is a drunkard who beats them. When Bob Ewell catches his daughter hugging the black man, he accuses Tom of raping Mayella to save their family from disgrace. "And so a quiet, respectable, humble Negro who had the unmitigated temerity to 'feel sorry' for a white woman has had to put his word against two white people's." (p. 204) Atticus Finch does his best to make Tom a free man. His efforts, though, only buy more time from the jury, which still returns a guilty verdict. Unlike her brother, Scout believes that "there's just one kind of folks. Folks." But Tom still ends up dead - shot as he tries to escape from punishment for a crime he did not (could not) commit. To Kill a Mockingbird could be a pretty "heavy" book for young readers if it only concentrated on racism, rape, and Atticus Finch's unsuccessful attempt to free an innocent man. So Lee combines the story of Tom Robinson with the mythology surrounding the inscrutable Mr. Arthur Radley, whom Jem, Scout, and their summertime friend Dill call Boo Radley. One story about Boo is that he stabbed his father with scissors while cutting newspapers for his scrapbook. Another story has Boo scratching neighbors' door screens. Yet another says that he eats squirrels. Kids love creepy stories, and the antics of the three friends as they try to make Boo come out of his house give the novel light and humor.

Although I had a rough time "getting into" To Kill a Mockingbird, when I finally did I was surprised by how good it was. By the way, the book has such a cool title. I didn't understand it at all when I began the book. Then, in chapter 10, I realized where the title came from. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." (p. 90) But not until Scout says to her father, "Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?" (p. 270), did I realize who the book's mockingbirds were. I will read this book with my children someday and hope they will with theirs.

Read it - You will not regret it!

Superbly written with a fine balance between the serious social issues and the light hearted view of our host. "To Kill a Mocking Bird" is set in Alabama in the 1930's and is told through the eyes of "Scout" the young daughter of Atticus the single parent town lawyer.

The central tale of the book is that of Tom a negro falsely accused of raping a white girl, who despite his innocence is found guilty by his bigoted peers. The secondary stories concern the struggles of Atticus to cope as a lone parent role model, the difficulty of being a child learning about concience and empathy as they grow up and the mysterious disappearance of Boo Radley.

The book builds slowly as it paints a vivid picture of the times, the characters and prevalant attitudes. Once the scene was set this book built such a head of steam I was unable to put it down. I read this book in one session, something I have never done before

To Kill a Mockingbird

Only growing up in the south would enable Harper Lee to capture the vicious sweetness that pervails there. Not only to capture it but then be able to transfer that on to the reader. You can smell the sweetness of the talcum through the sticky of the hot summer days. Sickly sweet. The church group women are vicious in their sweetness. Ardently praying for the savages in Africa while embracing the savage mores of the south. And in the midst of all of this she tells one of the greatest coming of age stories ever written. Fabulous. One I read every summer.