Go Set A Watchman-Should You Read It?

Genre: Fiction

Rating: 3.5/5

This book is a rough stand-alone, to say the least, and there is a reason for that.

Harper Lee revised and revised with her editor to make To Kill A Mockingbird a contemporary masterpiece set in 1935 American South. There were interesting messages, plot twists, and connections implemented in that novel.

Go Set a Watchman was never meant to be published. It is Lee’s original draft of To Kill A Mockingbird, literally found stuffed in a drawer a few years before her death. Because Lee never intended for this draft to be published, she wanted to be left alone, not wanting all the hype of being a writer. She wrote what she intended to get the ideas across about various topics, such as racism, education, socioeconomic status, gender, justice, and courage. And then she was done writing. Because of the success of her first novel, publishers sought to buy out her first draft just to get something else out there. Wanting to get these people off her back, Lee signed off the draft to be published with no edits to the plot, an elderly woman taken advantage of for her marketing value.

Some people like to look at it as a sequel, but that is not what this book is. This is Scout and Atticus and other characters before they were redefined in the perspective of an eight-year-old girl. In this book, Atticus is not the God-like figure we see in Mockingbird, and might even be just a little bit racist. Scout is 26 and visiting from where she now lives in New York. We see some reminiscences of her past as a child and in high school, reflecting on how Maycomb is not what she once remembered, and the people are just as relentless in race as ever.

So here’s the big gist of what I have to suggest about this book. If you have not read To Kill A Mockingbird, then do not read this book. The value and merit of this novel really only come from making comparisons between this first draft and how things have changed over the course of the writing process to create To Kill A Mockingbird. That is where the value lies in reading this book, but otherwise it feels tedious and a bit all over the place.

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