To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

 

Part of my occasional intermittent project to read books from the literary canon that I missed for one reason or another on my way through the American educational system. I gather from like cultural osmosis or something that the setting here is closely derived from Ms. Lee's childhood, it certainly bears a strong odor of familiarity (and of familiarity's direct descendent, contempt). Telling it from the POV of a young girl makes for some naivete-based unreliable narration, but because Scout is approximately never intentionally deceptive it's pretty easy to suss out what the people around here are really doing or talking about. There some elements that probably show the novel's age--something over sixty years as I write this: It starts out really slowly, the inciting event is like a quarter or more into the book; there's--in spite of the whiff of contempt I mentioned above--maybe a bit of "good whites in the Jim Crow South" in the attitude toward the characters, arguably some White Savior stuff that's a little thin. The story wraps a little obliquely, a little suddenly, and some of the other pacing is occasionally a little odd by modern standards. It's a good novel, though, at moments Lee's prose crackles and sings, and certainly American schools are doing well to include it in their canon.