In a very short period of time, my life went basically haywire – in a good way, but haywire all the same. Going to try to get back to this now, as I never stopped reading, I just stopped writing about what I was reading. So let’s begin, shall we?
Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman was my book event of the summer. I was very excited about it, and was thrilled to find it at my door on July 14th when I got home from work.
Due to the fact that I am now an adult with a job, unlike when the new Harry Potter books used to go out, it took me a couple of weeks to read. I wanted to finish my other book, and then I couldn’t sit home all day and read the book like I really wanted to.
For the record, there are some spoilers here.
I liked the book, but it was bittersweet.
Intellectually, I knew Go Set A Watchman was not a sequel but a first draft of the beloved To Kill A Mockingbird, but it was difficult for me to not read it as one.
Watchman, like Mockingbird, was a coming of age story, except in this version, Scout is 26 and nobody calls her Scout anymore, they call her Jean Louise. She’s dating Hank, and by the way, Jem dropped dead of a bad heart several years earlier.
The South is going through the Civil Rights era, and Scout is visiting from New York. Returning home, she finds all that fun white southern talk going on that makes everyone’s skin crawl.
Atticus, her hero, is also doing some of the talking, which shocks and disappoints Scout.
I found this version of Atticus very disappointing myself. He uses all those polite but flawed and retrospectively repulsive arguments about how negros shouldn’t be allowed to vote and what not “for their own good.”
There’s a point to all this, which I won’t reveal here, but the point is a bit of a let down, although one that does make sense, considering what we know about Scout.
There was a lot made of how this book was “discovered” and whether or not Harper Lee (who is not all there mentally anymore, and her sister, who protected her from a lot of outside influence passed away) was exploited in the publishing of this novel by any one of the people around her, since she said she’d never publish again and had held true to this for 50 years.
Naturally, I don’t want any little old lady exploited for money, but I don’t think there’s much left to say about the issue since the book’s already out.
All in all, I enjoyed Watchman, but not as much as Mockingbird. Some things you publish right the first time.
words in scarlet ink 