It’s impossible to write a review of Harper Lee’s ”Go set a watchman” without comparing it to her masterpiece ”To kill a mockingbird”. My comparison is short: The former not even close to the latter. ”To kill a mockingbird” is a classic for a reason. That’s not to say that ”Go set a watchman” is a bad book; it has many redeeming features. But more on that later. Jean Louise (aka Scout) Finch, one of the central characters of TKAM, is now an adult. She […]
Clueless
I had a lot of good reasons for not wanting to read this book. Even before all the pearl-clutching reviews came out bemoaning the racism of a beloved character, before the stories that pointed out how we’ve always misunderstood the race component of To Kill a Mockingbird [TKAM] anyway, I suspected that a sequel to a classic novel was bound to disappoint. And the strange circumstances of its publication, after decades of the author and her sister saying it never would be, further dampened any […]
An important, painful book
When I was a child, two of the most influential people in my life were my grandparents. I loved them with every fiber of my being. They were a stable rock in my unsteady and turbulent adolescent life. They provided me with the idea of the kind, loving Christian home I wanted for myself. One might even say I idolized them a bit. My grandma died ten years ago, and in the three weeks before her death, I found out a family truth that shattered […]
An interesting look at the seed behind To Kill a Mockingbird that tries to blend memoir, a love story and the political history of the south into one novel that doesn’t quite mesh together.
It’s not often you get to peek inside the publishing industry and read a manuscript before major overhauling. The original scroll for On The Road, for example, is more rambling, explicit and lacking in punctuation than it’s fully published counterpart – but follows much of the same beats (no pun intended.) Go Set A Watchman is a whole other beast. The story is now a familiar one to anyone who has glimpsed at a newspaper in the last few months; a manuscript delivered in the […]