Book Review | 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
376 pg., U.S. Paperback
HarperCollins
4 stars | A-



From Goodreads:

The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, To Kill A Mockingbird  became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.


Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature.

For fourteen years, I had avoided the literary presence of Harper Lee's literary masterpiece, often seeing it at relatives' homes or in the words spoken by authors regarding their inspiration, but I never really understood the cultural impact that the story had. Upon picking the novel up in March as a required reading for class, I fell in love with the story--a copy of which had been sitting on my book shelf for nearly year at that point.
The tale's characters (my favorites being Atticus Finch, Maudie Atkinson, and Boo Radley) were what truly won me over in the end. I fell in love with their presence, and how feasible they were. I felt like I really knew them all, which is all I really want in literature.
Harper Lee is actually my distant, distant cousin on account of the fact that she is a descendant of Robert E. Lee, whom I am descended from, as well. Upon finding this news, I sort of felt obligated to love her writing, but that obligation very much dissipated as I was absorbed into Lee's authenticity of life in the Depression.
The novel really is a work of art, and should be acknowledge by every single reader who ever lived.