If you’re in advanced English this year as a freshman, then you have a had a chance to read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the book is about young Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch, and how she grows up in Maycomb County, Alabama. 

I’m sure that most adults believe this book was a great coming of age story, but anyone with common sense could easily tell that this book was the equivalent of talking to a wall. I absolutely loathe this book. It was the biggest waste of time and I hope my children will never have to indulge themselves in the time it takes to read this book.

The story itself is hard to interpret, especially at the beginning where I was just all around confused. I will say that this was a good BOOK but not a good story. It’s only a good book because, yes I will agree that it brought an emotion out of me but not the kind of emotion I’m sure the writer had in mind. I’m sure Lee was trying to accomplish writing a story that would have readers sympathetic to how black people were treated, and I’m sure that she wrote this book to “make a change” and show that black people are in fact people.

But this story just made me angry, from the killing of an innocent man, the constant use of the n-word and the fact that in the story the little girl is always being told what to do and how to act; they were not letting her be herself.

This book was as racist as it can get, and the story is basically telling women how to act. Scout is told on multiple occasions how she should act more “ladylike.” Now I understand the author is only describing how life was for her growing up with racism, and feminism. But this book was just simply not good, and I don’t understand how one can enjoy this piece of literature. 

In the middle of the book there is a huge turn from the childhood life of Scout to a trial on how Tom Robinson, a black man, is falsely accused of raping a young white woman. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the so-called victim, Mayella (the young white girl), is lying, but of course the court is going to put up with her nonsense because she’s white. It also doesn’t take a genius to know that the bruises that Tom “allegedly” left when he raped her, are from her father. Her father was the one who hit her and she just outright lied, just to accuse a black man. Tom’s left hand doesn’t even have feeling and everyone in the court could clearly see that she had bruises on the right side of her face. That is from her father period.

This book has so many different turns. I got so confused I didn’t even know what season they were in. The whole book just goes back and forth from the trial to Scout’s life, then out of nowhere there’s  fire. On top of all of that, they throw in a random guy named Boo Radley. Come on now! Isn’t there enough going on in the book already?

From Scout trying to change herself to Tom Robinson dying an innocent man I feel like this book is just a never-ending sad scene. It’s not an enjoyable book and I DO NOT recommend it.