[BWF] To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 5 stars and many hearts once again--if you like. Audiobooks, Sissy Spacek is amazing

[Karin]

I've read this 4 times now, and someday will consolidate all of this--first review (for my second reading of the book ever) below and it's more of a "real review than I often give.

This is my second time listening to Sissy Spacek narrate it (read it in print twice, listened twice so far) and I love the way she does this (sorry, but it's spoiled me for Reese Witherspoon's reading, even if it's good.) Each time I read it I think of more things involved in this brilliant debut by Harper Lee. I can't think of anything wrong although some people do, but it's so very realistically portrayed. It is beautifully written but also heart-breakingly honest.

Original Review

Scout tells the tale of her family, Dill, Boo Radley and a volatile court case set in 1930s Alabama, and Sissy Spacek does a fabulous job of reading this book. If you haven’t yet read this, I strongly recommend it; when I first read it about ten years ago I wondered what had taken me so long to get around to reading it, but now I’ve listened to this recording twice in different years. Sure, Scout is only 6-9 while the story takes place, a precocious tomboy who has been reading as long as she can remember, much to the chagrin of her first grade teacher, but I for one don’t give the whole unreliable narrator idea an enormous amount of credence here. Obviously, it’s told from only one perspective, but it written so that it is easy to see past the child’s point of view to more of what is going on. There are so many people who have given a synopsis of this book, I don’t feel a need to do so here, and if you don’t know anything about this story before you read it, it will only make it that much better (other than understanding what was going on in Alabama in the 1930s, less than 60 years from the end of the civil war, that it was the Depression, and so on.) Also, if you know what was going on in the US at the time this book was written and published, that helps shed some light on this, even if it’s more than a generation later.

What I really appreciated the most this time around, besides the brilliant writing, plot, story and the reading by Sissy Spacek, was how well Harper Lee captured the people and set up the pacing and arc of the story. Also, that there are no two dimensional characters in this book, not even one.