Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The setting for this book is the fictional town of Macomb, Alabama in the mid 1930s. The narrator of the story is Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, a 10 year old tomboy. Her father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer who is defending a black man accused of raping a white woman. The likelihood of a black man getting a fair trial in the south in the 1930s is about 1 in a million...optimistically speaking. Scout gets some valuable life lessons from her father. She sees that doing the moral thing, is not always an easy, or popular, or safe thing to do. But it's the <i>right</i> thing to do. She also learns that everybody deserves to be treated with dignity and to receive justice, no matter what their skin color. I first read TKAM in high school 50 years ago. I re-read it, as I'm sure many others have, in preparation for reading the recently published "To Set a Watchman". I was touched deeply by this story in 1967. And I'm touched just as deeply in 2017. Harper Lee made us stare prejudice and injustice in the face, and made us want to aspire to be an Atticus Finch. A flag-waving 5 stars!