Go Set A Watchman

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch--"Scout"--returns home 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 Watchmanperfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in a painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past--a journey that can be guided only by one's conscience.

Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of 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. 



I think I am going to swear off sequels for a while after this. The last few I've read have been really disappointing so I really need to read something that I am going to like! For me, I suppose, sequels set the expectations too high. I want to LOVE them as much as the originals, and lately that hasn't been happening. Alas... on to the review.

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... Honestly, I don't know where to begin. There is SO much to talk about with this one and things interrelate to eachother, so I apologize if I bounce around a lot and this review seems a bit disconnected...

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... Ok, one more thing before I get going: I think it's important to know the background on the publishing history of this book because in some areas, it does really matter. I suppose it shouldn't, because normally you don't know what goes into the publication of a book, but in this case, being that this is Harper Lee's "second" (I'll explain the quotation marks in a minute) novel, and the "first" has been such a huge hit and is taught in schools now, it's kinda relevant. The truncated version is that Go Set A Watchman was written by Lee first, but rejected by publishers. One of the publishers told her that the story of Scout as a child would make for a better book, so she went and wrote that one. That book became To Kill A Mockingbird. For whatever reason, she never went about publishing Go Set a Watchman after To Kill a Mockingbird was published. Who knows if she forgot about it, or decided she was living well enough off of To Kill A Mockingbird that she figured she didn't need to bother publishing Go Set A Watchman, or if she figured if it had already been rejected what was the point of tryng again... who knows. But it was found in her attic or something and now is being published a good 60+ years after it was written. So which one is technically the first book? Thus the quotation marks. Anywhoo, now you have the abridged version of the history of this publication.

Ok... let's start with the arbitrary topic of inconsistencies. Inconsistencies are a big irritant with me. When we are told something happens one way and then something else later, that drives me mad. This mostly happens with series with MASS quantities of books, sometimes authors must have forgotten that they already wrote about some incident or topic in a previous novel, but in this book it was too big to be an oversight. It was a choice. At some point Lee changed the outcome of a huge plotline in To Kill A Mockingbird that differed from the passing mention of what happened in Go Set A Watchman. There is no way that any person that has read To Kill A Mockingbird could miss it. I'm not sure exactly why I bothered, but I took to the internet after reading that part and it is a general consensus that Go Set A Watchman is a parallel universe to that of To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm not sure if that is true, or just that is how the pubic is explaining this massive fuck up. I'm also not sure if that is better or worse in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps it's better because technically this book would have NOTHING to do with To Kill a Mockingbird if it's a parallel universe, but at the same time, why would anyone ever want to read about a parallel universe when the original is just fine? Not me. I think Lee just changed the story while writing To Kill a Mockingbird, and the publishers were so stoked about finding Go Set A Watchman that they didn't edit it or change a thing. The should have... they really should have.

I can totally see how publishers could read this book and see that a story about Scout's childhood would be better. The flashbacks in this story were easily my favourite parts, and most were from the time between Mockingbird and Watchman. Maybe if Lee had written Watchman as two books, one of the flashbacks in chronological order, and then published the rest as another book, then at least I would have liked the middle book of the series and been satisfied, rather than disliking Go Set a Watchman as a whole instead.

One thing I can say for this book is that Lee is still a master of the written word. Her book, in a literary sense, was smooth as silk. There was this one point where Scout is passing around sandwiches at a gawd awful party and was catching clips of all of these women's conversations. It was written beautifully and it almost felt like I was there. Great writing. In contrast, it really boils down to that the plot, or lack of one, that really killed it for me. In Mockingbird, there were two really solid plotlines that wove together really well (Tom Robinson's court case and Boo Radley). In Watchman there was nothing even comparable. Scout went back to Maycomb. Things are backward from what she prefers and she finds out things about her father that she doesn't like. That is all. Really nothing happened, and that is where the HUGE issue lies with this book. 

I really feel like everything that made To Kill a Mockingbird fantastic, all of the forward thinking and amazing parenting and tackling the issue of Human Rights, was really lost in this novel. Instead we got steps backwards in Women's rights. I don't want to get into any spoilers here, so I'm just going to say that perhaps had this book been published back in the 50s when it was written it would have flown, but today... I can't imagine it being received too well by younger generations the way To Kill a Mockingbird has been. 

I gotta say, I'd just recommend giving this one a pass. I found it tough to rate on GoodReads, this is where I need a 1/2 star system. Because this one would have fallen somewhere between an "it's OK" and "I didn't like it". I don't feel it's poor enough to get the 2-star rating that other books have gotten, but 3-stars is giving it too much credit for something so disappointing. Something still can be said for Lee's writing style, but the plot just isn't there. Just go read To Kill a Mockingbird and forget this book exists.