Welcome to the halfway
point of the United States of books! We have now reached review number
twenty-five and six months of reviews. I can’t thank the team
of reviewers enough and our fantastic readers. To say thanks to you all,
we are giving away a $25.00 Amazon gift card for 1st place and then a copy of
any of the US of Books books (winners choice) Kindle or physical copy (INT) as
long as Book Depository delivers, for 2nd place.
- 4 ½
Stars
Review by Laura at 125Pages.com
Synopsis –
Harper Lee's Pulitzer prize-winning masterwork of honor and
injustice in the deep south—and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and
violent hatred.
One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a
Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than
thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular
motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century
by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly
remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it
views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young
girl, as her father-a crusading local lawyer-risks everything to defend a black
man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
Review -
This week takes us to
Alabama with To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. EW says –
“Forget the dubious sequel. Lee’s exceptional work is a perfectly contained
miracle about the struggle for justice in a system built to destroy
it. From Birmingham to Tuskegee, Alabama was a burning center of racial
conflict, and this novel takes place right on the outskirts of that crucible.”
To
Kill A Mockingbird
by Harper Lee is one of the first “grown-up” books I remember reading. It was
the summer before 7th grade and I was a precocious twelve-year-old. I
loved that the person telling the story was a smart young girl and that she was
so very different from other book narrators that I had been exposed to. I read
it at least once a year and loved when it was on the book list in sophomore
year, as it made the book report easy to do. As I got older, I
stopped reading it as often, and as I picked it up this time realized it had
been at least ten years since I had last picked it up. As I cracked the
cover on my old worn copy, it was like stepping back in time to a period in my
life that had long since passed.
“I wanted you to see what real
courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his
hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway
and see it through no matter what.”
To
Kill A Mockingbird is
a complex story of a young girl, six-year-old Jean Louise Finch (Scout), who
lives with her lawyer and widower father Atticus and her older brother
Jem. Scout and Jem, together with the neighbor boy Dill, are
fascinated with their reclusive neighbor “Boo” Radley, a recluse that is never
seen. They begin to spin tales about him and try to entice him
outside. Meanwhile their father is assigned a case defending a black man,
Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping a young white woman. The two
stories weave together in a powerful tale of race relations in a small southern
town coming out of the Depression. Harper Lee crafted a tale of morality
and family that still resonates today.
“As you grow older, you’ll see
white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something
and don’t you forget it—whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter
who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man
is trash.”
Love and murder, racism
and redemption, all combine to make To Kill A Mockingbird a classic that
will remain read for years to come. The way that Harper Lee combined wide-eyed
youthful curiosity with the recollections of a grown woman make this a very
interesting read. The style of the story telling is unique and matches the very
detailed plot. The world created and described by Scout is vivid and real,
and I could picture the scenes unfolding quite clearly.
Now that I have
rediscovered Lee and Mockingbird, I regret ever leaving her world. A
Pulitzer Prize winner, To Kill A Mockingbird is a book that well
deserves its accolades as well as its criticisms. It does feature many
difficult topics and language that in today’s world is considered unacceptable.
I believe stories such as this still need to be told as we need to remember
what used to be commonplace. I will now try to plan an annual re-read to return
to this fascinating world. And, as said so well by Scout “Until I feared I
would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”
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