Atticus said to Jem one day, "I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father's right," she said. "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."
To Kill A Mockingbird (1960) is a timeless classic about growing up and of human dignity.
Compassionate, deeply moving, and dramatic, To Kill A Mockingbird takes readers to the roots of human behaviour - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humour and pathos.
Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man's struggle for justice.
Truman Capote said of Lee's book, "Someone rare has written this very fine novel, a writer with the liveliest sense of life and the warmest, most authentic humour. A touching book; and so funny, so likeable."
About the author: Harper Lee was born in 1962 in Monroeville, Alabama, a village that is still her home. She attended local schools and the University of Alabama. Before she started writing, she lived in New York, where she worked in the reservations department of an international airline. She has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, two honorary degrees and various other literary and library awards. Her chief interests apart from writing are nineteenth-century literature and eighteenth-century music, watching politicians and cats, travelling and being alone.
To Kill A Mockingbird was Lee's first and only novel. She has always considered her book to be a simple love story but today, it is regarded as a masterpiece of modern American literature.
Rating: 5/5
It is of course a classic. I had seen the movie a couple times but had never read the book. I enjoyed it and am glad I read it.
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