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  • I won't comment on the book's message, except to say that people worldwide today can still use a lesson or two on accepting other people who are different from themselves.

    Read the book, not for your school reading assignment but for the sake of reading, and you will understand what Harper Lee ... Continue

    I won't comment on the book's message, except to say that people worldwide today can still use a lesson or two on accepting other people who are different from themselves.

    Read the book, not for your school reading assignment but for the sake of reading, and you will understand what Harper Lee had to say.

    Equally brilliant but easily overlooked when reviewing this book is the writing, the language if you will, Harper Lee employed to construct the world of Scout.

    Yes, she constructed not only a story, not only a series of events, but an entire world as seen by a child growing up in Maycomb during the 30's.

    Not much of a writer myself, but I write novels on and off. And I believe in a minimalistic approach: the less you say that's unrelated to your main story line, the better. Don't waste two chapters on developments that can be summed up in two paragraphs.

    And we see a fine counterexample in "Mockingbrid".

    Reading the opening pages, you will find no trace of the theme advertised on the back cover: "a lawyer in the deep south defending a black man charged with the rape of a white girl." Instead, it is as if you can breath the hot summer's air, while running around in the yard as a seven-year-old.

    Those big houses, you have in fact never set foot in one, and have only seen them on American TV shows such as Knight Rider. And back then you were in the living room of some apartment building in some Asian city. But the fact doesn't stop you from feeling that world of Scout.

    And that's what drew me into the book. Not the message of acceptance and equality; not the social or historical value of the book. It's because I can feel so vividly another time, another age, another world all together. I can almost touch it if I just reach out, or it seems.

    Harper Lee maintained the same touch throughout the book. This is not a story about the trial and the aftermath, but an account of Scout's childhood through her own eyes, with the trial standing out as one big event.

    I don't think I can spell out my thought very clearly. What I mean to say is, it is so near-impossible to keep your focus while detailing on everything big and small. I certainly can't, and many published writers failed at one point or another at achieving the right balance.

    Yet Harper Lee did it-- not a "balance" between the two, which implies some sort of deliberate exclusion. She maxed out both sides.

    Pure genius. Something we can only admire and not copy. We are really not created equal in this case, and what can I say?

    

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• ― pthow said on Jul 20, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • 第一本看完的英文小說，僅有紀念意義。

    

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• ― Kanpatricia said on Nov 30, 2008 about the Mass Market Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • Read with the class in 7th grade

    

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• ― Alex Highgate said on Feb 6, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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  • I never had to read this in school. In my attempt to read the classics that I had missed along the way, I picked this up one summer. I was most impressed!

    Harper Lee's writing is wonderful. Too few writer's possess that use of language she has.

    

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• ― Batona said on Apr 22, 2007 about the Mass Market Paperback edition| Add your feedback

At the age of eight, Scout Finch is an entrenched free-thinker. She can accept her father's warning that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, because mockingbirds harm no one and give great pleasure. The benefits said to be gained from going to school and keeping her temper elude her.

The place of this enchanting, intensely moving story is Maycomb, Alabama. The time is the Depression, but Scout and her brother, Jem, are seldom depressed. They have appalling gifts for entertaining themselves—appalling, that is, to almost everyone except their wise lawyer father, Atticus.

Atticus is a man of unfaltering good will and humor, and partly because of this, the children become involved in some disturbing adult mysteries: fascinating Boo Radley, who never leaves his house; the terrible temper of Mrs. Dubose down the street; the fine distinctions that make the Finch family "quality"; the forces that cause the people of Maycomb to show compassion in one crisis and unreasoning cruelty in another.

Also because Atticus is what he is, and because he lives where he does, he and his children are plunged into a conflict that indelibly marks their lives—and gives Scout some basis for thinking she knows just about as much about the world as she needs to.

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