Well, there it is - the much touted other book by Harper Lee. I find it very hard to judge this book independently of To Kill a Mockingbird, as it's so entwined with it in many ways. I wasn't shocked and horrified as some people were, by revelations that many of Scout's family and friends had less-than-progressive attitudes about certain aspects of civil rights - after all, the book is set in the deep south; what should we expect? I wasn't even shocked by Scout's discovery that even Atticus isn't perfect - he's a man; what man (and in this instance, I mean "person") IS perfect? My main issue with this book, if I have one at all, is that there's such an assumption of underlying knowledge about history and literature that I found myself, from time to time, feeling like I had no idea what the characters were referring obliquely to. Yes, I could go look stuff up, but that's not the point. And frankly, I'm a person who knows a lot of literary stuff and usually gets references, more or less [Dorothy L Sayers always makes me feel undereducated in this way...]. In all, I'd say this was an interesting, and yes, valuable, companion piece to To Kill a Mockingbird, especially if one is looking at the literature & history of the South. I have a hard time imagining it standing on it's own, which isn't to say it couldn't - perhaps on its own it's a reasonably solid coming-of-age novel, valuable for that as well as its insights into the South.
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I have found it to be unreadable, but mostly because it is so poorly written at the sentence level! I gave up after a couple of chapters, wondering if someone could be playing a silly joke on us: could this clumsy and pedestrian prose have been produced by the same person who gave us the loveliness of "Mockingbird"? I'm thinking I should give it one more try, but it is currently at the bottom of a dense pile of TBR's (to be read).
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