Book Review: To Kill a Mockingbird

If any of you have plans to edit your current MS then I suggest you not decide to also paint your house. The hubby had his long weekend and that's what we decided to do. My body hurts and I got nothing done besides scraping paint off my house. Oh, and pressure washed it too! That was kinda fun. It's like a water gun on steroids.

Anyway, I did finish reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Several days ago in fact (see above for reasons this was delayed). I have mixed feelings about this book. I will probably never read it again. Maybe if my girls have to read it for school or something. But I enjoyed reading it and I totally understand why it's one of those books they make you read in school. Well, some schools do. Mine didn't, hence me just reading it now.

At first I didn't really get it. It's from the girl's pov. She's young. She talks about her day to day life. If the writing hadn't been excellent, I may have stopped, but Lee has a way of keeping your interest (That and it takes place in the South). Then the actual story starts to be weaved in. And I started thinking, you know, this book would be so much more interesting if it were told from Atticus' pov.

It wasn't until the end that I got it. The girl, Scout, is sitting in class. Everything has already happened with Tom (sorry, don't want to give spoilers here) and her teacher starts talking about what a bad man Hitler is because he doesn't like Jews. I think that one scene there is really what the book is about. I mean I hadn't read it before a couple of days ago, but even I knew it was about racism. But it was more than that. We tend to find faults with other people and don't see when we're making the same mistakes. And having the story told from a young girl's perspective, that point was made loud and clear. When her teacher talks about Hitler, she's sitting there thinking, how is this different from what we've just done? Are doing?

I'm not naive enough to think we don't have problems with racism today, but you have to admit, it was so much worse then. A book like this makes you stop and think. Maybe that's why it was so controversial when it came out. People didn't want to stop and think. But even today, 50 years later, we can take something from it.