Review: Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jean Louise is back in Maycomb, Alabama for her yearly two-week trip home. It is always hard to adjust to this quiet life after living in New York City, but this time her world’s foundation is rattled and Jean Louise begins to question her own beliefs. Although “Scout” has grown up, she has held firmly to the beliefs her father had taught her and with the Civil Rights Movement rocking the political landscape, her “color-blindness” is tested without limit. Memories of her childhood creep into her thoughts as she witnesses words and actions she never thought she would experience in Maycomb. What is happening to her beloved town? Why is she the only one who seems to notice?

Go Set a Watchman is an unexpected sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. Readers picking up this novel must remember that the events in this book take place 20 years after the events from the first book and I wouldn’t call it a direct sequel. The prose is elegant and the issues presented may have transpired over a half century ago, yet the same concerns are present today and the questions that Jean Louise is stumbling over are rattling around in society’s collective mind in the 21st century. I highly recommend this book to everyone who loved To Kill a Mockingbird and as a person who read it a couple days after its release … I wish I read it with a book club or other readers so that I could have talked about the topics immediately.


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