To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (5)
While it may not surprise any of you that I have given this book a ‘5’ rating, it may surprise you that this is my first time reading it. Val kindly lent me her copy when she heard of this serious hole in my reading history! I am so glad that she did. It was a true delight to experience this story for the first time. The characters were so richly written and the theme so heart-breaking. As with many of my favorite books, the sad truth of specific behaviors in our history (such as bigotry and ignorance here) is balanced with the strength of convictions and outstanding morality of several of the characters. This, coupled with the innocence of the young narrator, makes the book’s dark themes more tolerable to read. I’ve heard many people say that it is a shame that Harper Lee did not write any more books and question how much her friend, Truman Capote, contributed to the writing. Given that the book is very similar to Ms. Lee’s childhood, I don’t think it is odd that she had one story to tell and this was it. I didn’t feel the need to do a traditional review of this book, as most of you have likely already read it. Hopefully this just serves as a reminder to pull it out and enjoy it again. My only regret is that I could not get Gregory Peck out of my mind’s eye every time I thought of Atticus!
This is ironic that this book just came up. My 8th grade son had this last quarter for a reading assignment. Unfortunately, I was trying to read it with him and only got 1/3rd of the way through - and yes, I have never read it before. Anyway, his assignment for Language Arts was to create a wooden box that contained diary entries from one character in their voice - he picked Scout, a newspaper front cover (Maycomb County Times) - he wrote news entries about the house fire and the trial, letters between the characters in their voice - Dill to Scout, an opinion paper on how he liked the book, sketches from the imagery in the book (tree with hiding hole, bird, Radley's house, pocket watch) and then artifacts that represent the characters- a script from a play for Dill, bubble gum for Scout, a newpaper for Atticus, a watch for Jem and an apron for Calpurnia. Then they had to submit their opinion paper to a middle school national writing contest. I thought this was quite the assignment - very creative. He got an A. No news on the writing contest. Also, this book is my sister-in-laws favorite and she named all her dogs after the characters - Atticus, Scout and Jem.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great comments! It's nice to hear that schools are doing something so creative. Sounds like your son will remember this for a long time!
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