Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Many of the negative reviews of Go Set a Watchman have expressed the reader’s disillusionment with their beloved characters from To Kill a Mockingbird. My main disillusionment was with Harper Lee as I had long worshiped her as a literary genius and unfortunately, GSAW is just not a very good book. This book can only be of interest to writers and literature scholars as it illustrates how a very poor first draft can be reworked to become a masterpiece. In this case, by taking the only really moving and well-written scenes – those where Jean Louise reflects back to her childhood – and refocusing the work around these, discarding everything else. It also gives an insight into Harper Lee’s inspiration for writing TKAM as it reflects her views and her conflicts with her father, closer to the time at which she wrote TKAM. As a book in it’s own right, however, GSAW is disappointing and it is understandable why it was never originally published. The characters are not well fleshed out and, without our prior familiarity with them through TKAM, do not inspire interest or affection. As much publicized, they are also very different from the characters in TKAM. Not only is Atticus racist – and it must be said despite Jean Louise’s rejection of her father’s racism, her own views are also racist for our times – but Jean Louise’s trademark wilfulness, while engaging and spirited in TKAM, is here portrayed as almost churlish and in some cases malicious. In short, although her views on race are comparatively enlightened, she just doesn’t come across as a very nice person or one I really wanted to spend an entire book with. Uncle Jack, here given a bigger role than in TKAM, is characterised almost solely by his continuous and often obscure literary references. It said more about the writer at an immature and unpolished stage of her development, trying to show off her knowledge at the expense of believable and quality writing. The dialogue between Jack and Jean Louise was tedious and boring. The plot and narrative also fail to meet the mark, with very little happening admidst a lot of description and not very relevant back story. The final part of the book is almost entirely political polemic, much of it offensive in our day. Leaving that aside and taking into consideration the time at which it was written, it is dull. It may have its place on a 1950s political pamphlet but it makes for poor fiction reading – pages and pages and pages of it. A lot of it also assumed prior knowledge of specific legislation and political events which escaped me. Perhaps they were clearer to US citizens of a certain age. Events which could have become plot points – Zeebo’s son (and Calpurnia’s grandson) being charged with manslaughter of a white man, and Calpurnia’s estrangement from the family – were loose ends for me. Briefly mentioned but then never returned to or resolved. The pure focus on Jean Louise’s alienation and disillusionment denied attention to anything else in the novel, in a rather self-centred and frustrating sort of way as she just wasn’t interesting enough as a character in her own right. GSAW being unedited since the publication of TKAM, discrepancies between places and events in the two works were disconcerting. The geography of the town changed, with Jean-Louise’s love interest now having lived opposite during the events of TKAM but not mentioned at all in that book. The trial of Tom Robinson was different – the age of the alleged victim, the circumstances of the alleged rape, the injury that Tom had (arm severed rather than loss of function), and of course, the verdict. All in all, I am very sorry I read this book. Given such a lead up of anticipation, I was disappointed almost to the point of the tears. I had told myself it could not possibly be as good as TKAM but I had no idea it could possibly be this bad. Publishing it was clearly an exercise in money making – the expectations and the hype guaranteeing the kind of colossal sales undeserved by the quality of the book.