To Kill a Mockingbird

Hi everyone! Summer is almost over with only a few days left until school starts and I am still three blogs shy of my goal of fifty blogs. This summer has gone by so fast! I can't believe that I am going to be a senior! This book is another "flashback" book that I read a few years ago for school. This book I read for freshman year English and I am sure everyone who is reading my blog has heard of it: "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. Well without anymore delay, away we go.

Characters: Scout Finch: six year old girl/ spends lots of time with her brother Jem/ is the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird
Jem Finch: Scout's older brother/ gets into a lot of mischief with Scout and Dill/ is greatly affected by Tom Robinson's trial
Atticus Finch: father of Scout and Jem/ lawyer of Tom Robinson/ one of the few "color blind" people in the town
Tom Robinson: a black man convicted of raping a white woman/ is actually innocent/ hires Atticus Finch to be his lawyer
Boo Radley: reclusive neighbor of Jem and Scout/ occasionally provides help to the children/ is forced to live alone inside his house because of the evil rumors about him

The Plot: As a six year old growing up in Maycomb, Alabama, Scout doesn't have many worries. Running around with her brother Jem and friend Dill, Scout just concerns herself with day-to-day mischief and hunting for the reclusive Boo Radley who lives next door. All that changes when her father, Atticus Finch, one of the town's most respected lawyers takes on the case of a black man on trial for rape. Her world is flipped upside down as Scout begins to see that the world is not always as simple, or as harmless as she once thought. Scout discovers that not all people are as brave as her brother or as kind and moral as her father, which both scares and surprises her. Told through the thoughts of a six year old girl, Harper Lee creates a world which shows young Scout losing her innocence about the world in a very abrupt, and permanent way.

What I liked: I am about to go on a rant for a few sentences so if you want to skip this you can. I am going to talk about something that drives me absolutely crazy, but this isn't really essential to the critique. So here it goes: I absolutely hate hate hate hate it when a book like "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is banned and considered a bad influence because it uses the "n" word. I hate it even more when someone decides that it is a good idea to change a book like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and get rid of the "n" word entirely. Let me just say that I am well aware of the particular nastiness of that word and I will never, ever use it. But people did use the word and it is unfair to eliminate that word from an author's story. Mark Twain and Harper Lee are trying to create a story which shows a time where racism was prominent and you cannot just obliterate that word from their tales. The word was used and it is silly to think that we should just get rid of it. Now that being said, I don't think you should read these books until you are able to understand what the word means now and what it meant then; you need to be able to handle these books and the issues they discuss. But just because a book may be offensive, doesn't mean you should ban it or change it. You not only dishonor the writer but you dishonor the people who made the sacrifices to change our world. We need to tell the whole truth of what it was like and we cannot leave out parts because it is "too offensive". That is all I have to say about that, and now we can return to the book! I really like this book on so many levels. One of things that captured me the most about To Kill a Mockingbird was that Harper Lee really gave us a living, breathing town. The story had issues which plague every town: class stratification, racism, poverty, crime, and just general day-to-day struggles. It made Maycomb a very real place which we as readers feel connected to. We felt the divide in the town over Tom Robinson's case in no small part to Harper Lee's beautiful writing. She gave us one of the most famous literary characters of all time: Atticus Finch. His archetype has been repeated and replicated over hundreds of different stories but nothing beats the original. He was strong in all the ways that the rest of the town was weak and he continually surprised our narrator Scout with his kindness, and the fact that he was a surprisingly good shot (this is a significant scene so I won't really explain that much to avoid giving anything away). I loved the fact that Harper Lee chose a young Scout to be the narrator because Scout's progressive loss of innocence was a fundamental part of the story. Scout's path to "enlightenment" kind of followed the same path of Maycomb's enlightenment about the impurity of their town and the justice system. I am not afraid to admit that I am absolutely terrible at picking out "symbols" when I am reading. If you have read my review of "The Scarlet Letter" you know that I couldn't understand the symbolism in that book to save my life. While I have gotten better at it with time, I still feel like I miss a great deal. With To Kill a Mockingbird I didn't feel that way: I understood the symbols and I found the deeper message in the writing. That's one of the great things about this book. I honestly feel that anyone, provided they have some historical context, could pick up the book and just "get" the story. Any person can read this book and learn something, can take a lesson, can see something about humanity as a whole. Maybe it is the simplicity of a little girl as a narrator or the clear moral compass of Atticus Finch but as a reader every little thing, every detail that Lee wants us to see is perfectly clear. Some books are great, but ultimately forgettable, but To Kill a Mockingbird will never be forgettable.

What I didn't like: To be honest, I felt it was a little slow to start with, but it definitely made up for it in the end. I think the reason for the sort of slow start was that Lee wanted to firmly establish the characters before she jumped into the trial.

Overall: 10 out 10. It is a literary classic; how could I rate it any other way?