07/20/2015
Reviewed by Louisa ErmelinoThe editor who rejected Lee's first effort had the right idea. The novel the world has been waiting for is clearly the work of a novice, with poor characterization (how did the beloved Scout grow up to be such a preachy bore, even as she serves as the book's moral compass?), lengthy exposition, and ultimately not much story, unless you consider Scout thinking she's pregnant because she was French-kissed or her losing her falsies at the school dance compelling. The book opens in the 1950s with Jean Louise, a grown-up 26-year-old Scout, returning to Maycomb from New York, where she's been living as an independent woman. Jean Louise is there to see Atticus, now in his seventies and debilitated by arthritis. She arrives in a town bristling from the NAACP's actions to desegregate the schools. Her aunt Zandra, the classic Southern gentlewoman, berates Jean Louise for wearing slacks and for considering her longtime friend and Atticus protégé Henry Clinton as a potential husband—Zandra dubs him trash. But the crux of the book is that Atticus and Henry are racist, as is everyone else in Jean Louise's old life (even her childhood caretaker, Calpurnia, sees the white folks as the enemy). The presentation of the South pushing back against the dictates of the Federal government, utilizing characters from a book that was about justice prevailing in the South through the efforts of an unambiguous hero, is a worthy endeavor. Lee just doesn't do the job with any aplomb. The theme of the book is basically about not being able to go home again, as Jean Louise sums it up in her confrontation with Atticus: "there's no place for me anymore in Maycomb, and I'll never be entirely at home anywhere else." As a picture of the desegregating South, the novel is interesting but heavy-handed, with harsh language and rough sentiments: "Do you want them in our world?" Atticus asks his daughter. The temptation to publish another Lee novel was undoubtedly great, but it's a little like finding out there's no Santa Claus.
Go Set a Watchman: A Novel
Narrated by Reese Witherspoon
Harper LeeUnabridged — 6 hours, 57 minutes
Go Set a Watchman: A Novel
Narrated by Reese Witherspoon
Harper LeeUnabridged — 6 hours, 57 minutes
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Overview
Performed by Reese Witherspoon
#1 New York Times Bestseller
“Go Set a Watchman is such an important book, perhaps the most important novel on race to come out of the white South in decades.""* -*New York Times*
A landmark novel by Harper Lee, set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch-“Scout”-returns home to Maycomb, Alabama from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town, and the people dearest to her. Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past-a journey that can only be guided by one's own conscience.
Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of the late Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor, and effortless precision-a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times. It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context, and new meaning to an American classic.
Editorial Reviews
What makes Go Set a Watchman memorable is its sophisticated and even prescient view of the long march for racial justice. Remarkably, a novel written that long ago has a lot to say about our current struggles with race and inequality.
Go Set a Watchman’s greatest asset may be its role in sparking frank discussion about America’s woeful track record when it comes to racial equality.
One overarching theme that many critics have zeroed in on is that there is a lot to learn from the novel, as both a writer and a reader.
Go Set a Watchman is such an important book, perhaps the most important novel on race to come out of the white South in decades…
A coming-of-age novel in which Scout becomes her own woman…Go Set a Watchman’s voice is beguiling and distinctive, and reminiscent of Mockingbird. (It) can’t be dismissed as literary scraps from Lee’s imagination. It has too much integrity for that.
Go Set a Watchman is more complex than Harper Lee’s original classic. A satisfying novel… it is, in most respects, a new work, and a pleasure, revelation and genuine literary event.
Go Set a Watchman’s gorgeous opening is better than we could have expected.
[Go Set a Watchman is] filled with the evocative language, realistic dialogue and sense of place that partially explains what made Mockingbird so beloved.
Atticus’ complexity makes Go Set a Watchman worth reading. With Mockingbird, Harper Lee made us question what we know and who we think we are. Go Set a Watchman continues in this noble literary tradition.
[Go Set a Watchman] contains the familiar pleasures of Ms. Lee’s writing- the easy, drawling rhythms, the flashes of insouciant humor, the love of anecdote.
In this powerful newly published story about the Finch family, Lee presents a wider window into the white Southern heart, and tells us it is finally time for us all to shatter the false gods of the past and be free.
Go Set a Watchman offers a rich and complex story… To make the novel about pinning the right label on Atticus is to miss the point.
[Go Set a Watchman is a] brilliant book that ruthlessly examines race relations
Watchman is compelling in its timeliness.
Don’t let ‘Go Set a Watchman’ change the way you think about Atticus Finch…the hard truth is that a man such as Atticus, born barely a decade after Reconstruction to a family of Southern gentry, would have had a complicated and tortuous history with race.
[Go Set a Watchman] captures some of the same small-town Southern humor and preoccupation with America’s great struggle: race.
Go Set a Watchman provides valuable insight into the generous, complex mind of one of America’s most important authors.
A deftly written tale… there’s something undeniably comforting and familiar about sinking into Lee’s prose once again.
As Faulkner said, the only good stories are the ones about the human heart in conflict with itself. And that’s a pretty good summation of Go Set a Watchman.
Lee’s ability with description is evident… with long sentences beautifully rendered and evoking a world long lost to history, but welcoming all the same.
Harper Lee’s second novel sheds more light on our world than its predecessor did.
[Go Set a Watchman] contains the familiar pleasures of Ms. Lee’s writing- the easy, drawling rhythms, the flashes of insouciant humor, the love of anecdote.
Atticus’ complexity makes Go Set a Watchman worth reading. With Mockingbird, Harper Lee made us question what we know and who we think we are. Go Set a Watchman continues in this noble literary tradition.
Go Set a Watchman provides valuable insight into the generous, complex mind of one of America’s most important authors.
Watchman is compelling in its timeliness.
Go Set a Watchman’s greatest asset may be its role in sparking frank discussion about America’s woeful track record when it comes to racial equality.
Don’t let ‘Go Set a Watchman’ change the way you think about Atticus Finch…the hard truth is that a man such as Atticus, born barely a decade after Reconstruction to a family of Southern gentry, would have had a complicated and tortuous history with race.
What makes Go Set a Watchman memorable is its sophisticated and even prescient view of the long march for racial justice. Remarkably, a novel written that long ago has a lot to say about our current struggles with race and inequality.
Harper Lee’s second novel sheds more light on our world than its predecessor did.
Go Set a Watchman is such an important book, perhaps the most important novel on race to come out of the white South in decades…
09/15/2015
Scout, who now goes by Jean Louise, is 26, and returns to Macomb, AL, from New York, where she has been living, to find that her beloved father, Atticus, now old and crippled with arthritis, has joined the White Citizen's Council and adamantly opposes the NAACP. She struggles to understand his decision, one that will shock readers of To Kill a Mockingbird, who remember Atticus defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Lacking the power and narrative quality of Mockingbird, this coming-of-age novel does present a vivid picture of small-town life, complete with its bigotry and stereotypes. Jean Louise doesn't fare as well, though; her rebellious personality is better suited to the childhood shenanigans described in Mockingbird. Reese Witherspoon narrates credibly, though perhaps more dramatically than necessary. VERDICT Listeners curious about this book after all of the hype will probably be disappointed, not only in its main characters but in the long, polemical discussions of race that try to justify racism. ["Disturbing, important, and not to be compared with Mockingbird; this book is its own signal work": LJ 8/15 starred review of the Harper hc.]—Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
08/01/2015
As every reader knows, Lee's second novel, from which her iconic To Kill a Mockingbird was spun 55 years ago, has just been published by Harper with considerable excitement and some still-shifting uncertainty, as reported by the New York Times, about how the manuscript was rediscovered. Lee's original work has feisty 26-year-old Jean Louise Finch, nicknamed Scout as a child and the basis for Mockingbird's beloved heroine, returning home from New York to Maycomb Junction, AL, post-Brown v. Board of Education and encountering strongly resistant states'-rights, anti-integrationist forces that include boyfriend Henry and, significantly, her father, Atticus Finch, Mockingbird's moral center. Readers shocked by that revelation must remember that there are now two Atticus Finches; the work in hand is not a sequel but served as source material for Lee's eventual Pulitzer Prize winner, with such reworked characters a natural part of the writing and editing processes. Even if one can imagine that the seeds of the older Atticus are there in the younger Atticus—and that's possible—these are different characters and different books. More significantly, the current work stands as you-are-there documentation of a specific time and place, contextualizing both Mockingbird and the very beginnings of the civil rights movement, and for that reason alone it's invaluable and recommended reading. Mockingbird's Atticus was right for 1960, just after the Little Rock integration crisis, with his defense of a wrongly accused African American making him a moral beacon and a lesson for all. Yet for many readers, even those who love and admire Mockingbird, it also smacked of white self-congratulation, and the current book is a rawer, more authentic representation of Southern sentiment at a tumultuous time, years removed from the solidly (and safely) segregationist era of Mockingbird. If Watchman is occasionally digressive or a bit much of a lecture, it's good enough to make one wish that Lee had written a dozen works. It's also a breathtaking read that will have the reader actively engaged and arguing with every character, including Jean Louise. In the end, despite Jean Louise's powerful articulation that the court had to rule as it did, that "we [whites] deserve everything we've gotten from the NAACP," and that Negroes (as the novel says) will rise and should rise, it's unsettling and, yes, disappointing that the confrontation between Jean Louise and Atticus is ultimately an engineered effort to make her stand up for herself and stop worshipping her father. That's not quite believable, and what's right gets a little lost in states' rights, which Jean Louise herself supports. At least she doesn't run back to New York, but did she really win her argument? The ugly things she hears around her are still being said today. VERDICT Disturbing, important, and not to be compared with Mockingbird; this book is its own signal work.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Oscar-winning actress and Southern girl Reese Witherspoon portrays the narrator of the masterpiece TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, who is now an adult called by her full name, Jean Louise, living in New York City. As she describes her return to her hometown for an annual visit, the story features many of the same characters in MOCKINGBIRD, but they’re radically different in outlook. All are portrayed by Witherspoon with perfect pitch and pacing, and the sure hand of a talented actress who is well aware of the region’s racially fraught past. Lee’s new novel draws on the same theme as MOCKINGBIRD—empathy—but as Witherspoon wistfully portrays Atticus, Scout, and others, listeners will need to find new ways of understanding them. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2016 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
2015-07-15
The long-awaited, much-discussed sequel that might have been a prequel—and that makes tolerably good company for its classic predecessor. It's not To Kill a Mockingbird, and it too often reads like a first draft, but Lee's story nonetheless has weight and gravity. Scout—that is, Miss Jean Louise Finch—has been living in New York for years. As the story opens, she's on the way back to Maycomb, Alabama, wearing "gray slacks, a black sleeveless blouse, white socks, and loafers," an outfit calculated to offend her prim and proper aunt. The time is pre-Kennedy; in an early sighting, Atticus Finch, square-jawed crusader for justice, is glaring at a book about Alger Hiss. But is Atticus really on the side of justice? As Scout wanders from porch to porch and parlor to parlor on both the black and white sides of the tracks, she hears stories that complicate her—and our—understanding of her father. To modern eyes, Atticus harbors racist sentiments: "Jean Louise," he says in one exchange, "Have you ever considered that you can't have a set of backward people living among people advanced in one kind of civilization and have a social Arcadia?" Though Scout is shocked by Atticus' pronouncements that African-Americans are not yet prepared to enjoy full civil rights, her father is far less a Strom Thurmond-school segregationist than an old-school conservative of evolving views, "a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses," as her uncle puts it. Perhaps the real revelation is that Scout is sometimes unpleasant and often unpleasantly confrontational, as a young person among oldsters can be. Lee, who is plainly on the side of equality, writes of class, religion, and race, but most affectingly of the clash of generations and traditions, with an Atticus tolerant and approving of Scout's reformist ways: "I certainly hoped a daughter of mine'd hold her ground for what she thinks is right—stand up to me first of all." It's not To Kill a Mockingbird, yes, but it's very much worth reading.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940160504384 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2015 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 568,156 |
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