Why did I love this book?
Jean Louise Finch is the magnifying glass that sees and understands more than her eight years would first suggest. Her nickname ‘Scout’ not only tells us something about her curiosity for life in her small-town world but is also a flag that signals the change in a single minded and racist world.
While Lee lulls us with twilight motes filtering through the Dogwood trees lining southern sidewalks, she slowly allows us to understand that it is the innocent who live by the grace of others, and that it is most often the innocent who suffer at their hands as well. Most importantly that we are the change in our own environment if only we can look around us.
42 authors picked To Kill a Mockingbird as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'
Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped…