GO SET A WATCHMAN.

GO SET A WATCHMAN by HARPER LEE.

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch – ‘Scout’ – returns home from New York City to visit her ageing 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 be guided only by one’s own conscience. 

- Inner Front Cover Blurb

Since Atlanta, she had looked out the dining-car window with a delight almost physical.

- First Sentence, Part 1; Chapter 1

 There was no doubt Alexandra Finch Hancock was imposing from any angle; her behind was no less uncompromising than her front. Jean Louise had often wondered, but never asked, where she got her corsets. They drew up her bosom to giddy heights, pinched in her waist, flared out her rear, and managed to suggest that Alexandra's had once been an hourglass figure.

- Memorable Moment, Page 26

SOURCE ... A Reading Group read.

READ FOR A CHALLENGE? ... No.

MY THOUGHTS ... Whilst I am of course aware that its out there, I personally have very rarely come across book snobbery but the author's previous novel 'To Kill A Mockingbird', a book I neither enjoyed as a teen when I first read it nor as a more mature reader many years later, is one of those that I'm constantly told I MUST have liked, that EVERYONE likes it.

Not a predecessor as much of the hype surrounding it would have you believe, Go Set A Watchman is in fact no more a sequel than it is a prequel. 

Surrounded in controversy. Allegedly written some years prior to To Kill A Mockingbird, this, the author's second novel, tells the story of Scout (now an adult known as Jean Louise); a story that it is said Ms Lee's then editor persuaded her to go away and revise, re-writing her as a young girl as opposed to a women in her mid-twenties.

Not a book I enjoyed any more than To Kill A Mockingbird. Alas I found Go Set A Watchman, lacking in anything other than a rudimentary plot (much of it reading not so much as a story as a series of short stories, of daydreams/flashbacks chronicling various events), a tedious read. 

But most of all, there was the writing itself.

It is reputed that other than the most basic of proofreads the book received no editing whatsoever; something I am more than prepared to believe as woefully amateurish, meandering; the formatting and sentence structure poor; the third person narration shifting aimlessly ... I could go on.

Said to have lain in the back of a cupboard for decades, sad to say but I can't help but feel it was perhaps best left there.