To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

(original book review posted August 2, 2016)

To this day, I get soft somewhere in my gut when I think of the beauty of the language of this book. It evoked emotions in me as a young teenager that changed the way I looked at the world.

I love the characters - those hysterical children, Jem, Dill, and Scout - a town rich with side characters, and the gem of a father that everyone wishes he had - Atticus Finch. I'm getting emotional as I think of everything I learned from being 13 and watching this imaginary man teach his imaginary daughter. I learned right along with Scout about the injustice of prejudice, the potential smallness and pettiness of human nature, along with its potential nobility and greatness.

I love the easy, unpretentious meandering of a well-structured plot that almost takes you by surprise in that meandering. It's characteristically southern in its casual pace, and almost seems to be going nowhere. But Lee knew where she was going, and because of expert story-telling, the destination doesn't just take you by surprise - it takes your breath away. Oh, how I love a writer who can weave such a story!

I love the important lessons in a seemingly unimportant time and place, told in a seemingly unimportant way. That Lee is capable of seeing the Finch's neighbors with both compassion and stark honesty as she takes their masks off at various points in the story is masterful. I only got a broad sense of the spectrum of humanity Lee was painting when I was 13 - but it continues to move me, just writing about it today.

To use the ordinary to do something extraordinary is the best of art; it's God-like. One of the best lines in the book is where Scout's neighbor tells her that God puts some people on the earth to do the ugly things that none of the rest of us wanted to do, and that Atticus was such a man. Lee writes it in such a way as to make you want to be such a person - to do what is right, even when it is hard, simply because it IS right.

I have at least 50 books that I sort of cram into a "top ten" list. But this one is in the REAL top ten. It has mattered that I've read this book. <3