To Kill A Mockingbird follows the story of Jean Louise, a young girl who lives in sleepy

Maycomb, Alabama from 1933-1935 during The Great Depression. We follow Jean
Louise’s experiences as she learns about the world. She learns what’s expected of
women, how certain families come from “good blood” and “bad blood”, how poverty or
wealth can affect a family’s standing. She learns most importantly about morality, mostly
via guidance from her father Atticus Finch, the town’s lawyer. Most of the story is set
around Atticus Finch’s defence of a black man within the town who has been accused of
raping one of the young women. From this one trial, Jean Louise learns so much about
people’s beliefs at the time – a time when black people were wrongly seen as far inferior
to white people and were supposed to work for white people.

I’ll be honest, I absolutely loved every single word written in this book. Harper Lee
writes from the point of a child in such a pure and believable way. Jean Louise questions
everything – she hasn’t been brought up to hate black people – their housemaid is black
and she is one of the family, she’s loved equally to everyone as that’s how she’s been
brought up. So when people show displeasure and prejudice, Jean Louise asks her father,
she asks her older brother Jim and she questions everyone as she’s not sure why they do.
With these questions, Atticus consistently gives her a balanced and morally right view of
the situation. He tells her why, he tells her his views and he explains that she should
develop her own views based on how people treat her, not the colour of their skin, their
gender or anything otherwise.

It’s a story that will leave your heart feeling whole and pure. Atticus Finch is the perfect
father figure and Jean Louise is the perfect blank canvas with Harper Lee uses to ask the
real questions that would have been asked by so many young in the 1930s and prior. I
could go on for many more paragraphs about how this book can teach children and those
with prejudice views a smarter, more simple way to view everyone but I’ll stop here
before this begins to become an ethics essay.

Characters – 5/5
Jean Louise is brilliant – she’s a young feisty girl who defies everything that society
expects her to be. During the period, women were expected to behave like “women”.
This meant wearing dresses, understanding your role as a man’s aid, speaking properly,
curtsying to everybody etc. However, as I mentioned above, Jean Louise has been
brought up by a man that’s never taught her what she should or shouldn’t be and so
having an older brother has left her as a bit of a tom-boy. She loves to get muddy, she
gets into fist-fights at school and she’s not afraid to answer back if she genuinely doesn’t
believe what’s being asked of her is what she should do. She’s strong, incredibly
intelligent and utterly lovable throughout – despite her quite obvious flaws as a child
growing up in a fairly backwards society.

Atticus Finch is written as a true hero. He’s a well-educated, well-read white man who
always says and does the right thing. He always knows the best way to phrase tricky
topics and he never fights or argues, even in situations where he has every right to do so.
There’s an element to Atticus of wanting so hard for his children to be genuinely good
people that the choices he makes and things he says are possibly not what he’d always
say or do out of the earshot of the children.

The supporting characters throughout the novel are all fantastic too. You have those who
are racist, those who are sexist, those who come from more affluent backgrounds and
those who come from poorer backgrounds. These all meld into creating such a broad
stroke of different characters.

To Kill A Mockingbird summary – 5/5

I listened to To Kill a Mockingbird via audiobook and I read the kindle version too and
whichever I was choosing to do, I found myself absolutely obsessed and invested by the
story and the characters. When I pick up a classic, I always go into it with hesitancy as I
worry I won’t grasp why it’s received the acclaim it has and to have endured for such a
long time. But I can 100% see why To Kill A Mockingbird is considered one of the
greatest novels ever written. It gives you an utterly pure look into prejudice and the
beginnings of the questions of whether it’s right the way people of colour were treated
back then and whilst doing so writes in some utterly loveable characters, a gripping story
and the feeling of completion when finished.

If you’ve not read To Kill A Mockingbird, I would highly recommend it to absolutely

everyone. Usually, I pick a genre so I can link it to those genre reviews on my blog but I
have to recommend this book to everybody. It’s fantastic and possibly up there with one
of my favourite novels I’ve ever read.