Go Set a Watchman

Genre: Fiction

This is the story of Jean Louise Finch (formerly Scout) twenty years or so post To Kill a Mockingbird. Jean Louise is in her 20's, working in New York City and has returned home to Maycomb, Alabama, to care for her aging father, Atticus. Atticus, still working as a lawyer, reintroduces her to his protege, and her childhood sweetheart, Henry Clinton, and Jean Louise slowly falls for the guy, again. But she isn't sure that she wants to return to the little town she left only a few years earlier. And then it happens. She finds Atticus and Henry engaged in a legal/political interaction at the local court house and she is confused about what she sees. Is Atticus really saying blacks don't deserve the same rights as whites? Is he really saying that the NAACP is causing trouble instead of helping? Jean Louise is confused about the new information she's learned and can't reconcile this new reality with her childhood memories when Atticus saved a black man wrongly accused of rape. This is the story of growing up and seeing our parents for who they really are, and understanding that sometimes what we thought is the absolute truth is our own made-up version.

As soon as I finished this book, I immediately went online to do some research. I was thinking that I completely misunderstood this book or that I'm missing something. It wasn't hard to learn that Lee apparently wrote Go Set a Watchman first and that her publishers turned her down. Two years later she finished To Kill a Mockingbird as a result of their request to write about Scout's (I'm sorry, but I just can't call her Jean Louise) childhood. This first book is a non-story story where truly nothing happens other than this interaction with Atticus and Henry. There was a sentence, a paragraph, a moment that I felt so happy because Scout was her same old scrappy, young girl, now a woman, but then the endless whining began and I was lost.

Honestly, I don't get it. How can the person who thought up the sweetest childhoods for Scout and Gem, and Atticus's brave and smart legal battle in and out of the courtroom, write this story about the same people? I read that Lee never gave permission for this book to be published before her death in 2016. I hope that she did that because she knew. She knew that a generation of young girls grew up thinking that Scout was the coolest girl ever because she was self-assured and tough. She knew that Atticus was the bravest and wisest of all. She knew that in a world of grey, she made racism and bigotry black and white, right and wrong. And she knew that undoing all of that would not go over well. I'm disappointed.