Pagetitle: Jason Cain

Review

Rating: 9

Like many other American school kids, To Kill a Mockingbird was required reading for me in school (although I can’t remember which grade–ninth, maybe?). At the time I saw it mostly as an assignment to be completed with the minimum amount of time and effort. However, I was experiencing a shortage of English language reading materials here in Germany, and gave it another read. In my opinion it deserves its status as a classic of American literature. It has interesting characters with some real depth, a dramatic story with a pace that alternates between leisurely and tense, and a powerful message about racism and harmony among people.

Although the time and place I grew up in were very different in most respects from Depression-era Alabama, I still found echoes of the people and situations from To Kill a Mockingbird in my memories of growing up in small-town Central Texas. I think in many ways Americans have come a long way (some more than others, of course) in the manner in which they think about and interact with people of other races, but the fact that parts of this book still ring true today shows that we still have farther to go. I found this book thought provoking and very readable, a quality rare among “classics” of literature in my experience. Recommended for anyone who didn’t give it a fair chance the first time around.