"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

Review by Madeline Salmon
What is there to say that hasn't already been said about one of the best books ever written?

I could tell you what To Kill a Mockingbird is about if you haven't read it: growing up, prejudice in its many forms, sibling relationships, childhood adventures, the American legal system, discovering that our parents are real people,  learning how to live in a world that is not quite as it should be.

This isn't getting us anywhere.

Maybe I'll just tell you why I love it so much. I first read it for school in ninth grade and have been longing to reread it ever since. It's the kind of book you want kids to read and then pick up again when they're old enough to get even more out of it.

To begin with, there's Harper Lee's loving and honest portrayal of her characters. One would never doubt that Scout, Jem, and Dill are real children. And to some extent, they are. It seems that the story may have strong autobiographical elements, with Scout based on Lee herself and Dill based on her childhood friend Truman Capote. And the relationship between Scout and her older brother Jem is lovely and true without being sentimental.

The story itself holds us in thrall, too. It starts off easy enough, with the children's Boo Radley adventures, but becomes more sinister as their attorney father Atticus is called upon to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman. Scout and Jem have a lot to learn about the ugliness and the greatness of people, and so do we.

And then there's Atticus. I do not kid when I say that his courtroom speech should be required reading for everyone serving on a jury. I could hurl all sorts of great Atticus quotes at you. Probably the most popular is this one: "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." But my favorite is when he's talking to Jem about Mrs. Dubose, an old woman made mean from chronic pain and illness. Before she died she wanted to defeat her morphine addiction so that she could die "beholden to nothing and nobody." Atticus was always kind to her even though she cursed him for defending a black man. Jem can't understand Atticus' respect for Mrs. Dubose and why he made Jem read to her when she was ill. Atticus says, "She had her own views about things, a lot different from mine, maybe...I wanted you to see something about her--I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do." If all the lawyers in the world had a smidgeon of Atticus' integrity, we might be living in something approaching a utopia. No, scratch lawyers. Fathers.

But Scout may get to speak the wisest words of the book. Jem is trying to figure out the different classes of people in their town of Maycomb, Alabama, and he has it down to four: the white collar folks, the blue collar folks, the white trash, and the black people (these are my own terms because Jem's don't make sense without reading the book). Scout thinks Jem is just acting too wise for his own good and responds, "Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks."

What a thought.