mikecampau

I read this in...probably Junior High, in English class. As an adult, I didn't remember a damn thing about it, except their quest to draw Boo Radley out from his house (and that he wasn't as scary as they thought). After reading it again, I see why it's a classic. It has a rhythm to it, the pace of their small-town life, punctuated by the hard smack of serious issues about our country's history of racism. I unintentionally ended up reading a number of books about race relations in the depression kind of all at once, and this one hit harder than many of them. If I had a beef with this book, though, it would be the eerie maturity and sometimes disturbing independence of our eight-year-old narrator. At times, Scout seemed to have the vulnerabilities and fears of a typical kid her age, but at other times, she felt a bit like the tool of an adult author offering the kind of naivete it sometimes takes to take a hard look at entrenched societal habit. Certainly, some of that can be attributed to the book's setting in a very different time and place than my own, but not all of it. Still, that dissonance was minor compared to the overall power of the book. Is there any way Junior High teachers can assign their students to read the texts then, and again in 20 years?

2020-09-03 07:47