To Kill A Mockingbird Review

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” ~Harper Lee

A well known novel that is read by most middle school and/or high school students in their literature class. Harper Lee’s infamous novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, told the story of Scout Finch, her brother Jem, and their widowed father Atticus in Maycomb, Alabama. The novel takes place during the Great Depression as Atticus is a prominent lawyer and have the family living well off in comparison to the rest of society.

Looking into the lens of Scout, she befriends a boy named Dill and together, reenact the story of Boo Radley, which was put to a stop by her father. The novel focuses heavily on the trial of Atticus representing a black man during the time of racism in the South, Tom Robinson, who was accused of raping a white woman. Due to this, Jem and Scout received the backlash from other children.

As this trial is the major plot point of the novel, it opened up many themes that should be recognized, if not already mentioned above:

• The coexistence of Good and Evil
• Importance of Moral Education
• Existence of Social Inequality
• Prejudice/Racism
• Law
• Lying

Working backgrounds with the not-so-obvious themes, throughout the novel, there were two lies that was told that serves as the heart of the novel. Since both reveals some things about a major plot of the novel, I will not reveal them.

In terms of social inequality, social status explored the large hierarchy of Maycomb with the families that are introduced in the novel: The Finches, The Cunninghams, The Ewells and the black community.

Moral Education plays a role between the relationship of Atticus with Jem & Scout. Since the novel is in the perspective of the children, specifically Scout, showed how they were taught as the move from “innocence” to adulthood at school and in the community.

To keep the most important theme easy to understand, the coexistence of Good and Evil in To Kill a Mockingbird is the battle between of moral nature within human beings, are people essentially good or essentially evil? With the transition of the childhood’s innocence to the Tom Robinson’s case, the novel embodies a moral voice, Atticus Finch, for he is the most unique character who has experience with both goodness and evilness and can comprehend both qualities.

If you haven’t read this novel sometime during your middle school or high school career, I highly recommend you read it. If not, I highly recommend watching the 1962 film adaptation ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ which is a very close adaptation to the novel. Harper Lee did write a sequel to this novel, Go Set a Watchman, before she passed on February 19, 2016. I’m still reading the sequel now, but what I can share is that there are things that has changed from the first novel

“Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs. They don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” ~Harper Lee