To Kill A Mockingbird was okay. I did like it, despite the fatc that it's definately not something I would normally read, and that we read it for school.
I don't like being forced to read things, so when it does happen it sort of puts a damper on the entire thing and makes me reluctant to really like it.
I liked TKAM for the same reason I like the other books I've been reading. The characters are not flat. With the exception of Arthur Radley, you can easily imagine all of the characters as people. The children, while they're children, are imaginative and rambunctious, just like children have a tendancy to be. The adults in the novel are also realistic. There are different types of them. There's the nice lady neighbor who's sort of like an aunt who enjoys the children's company and is someone they can turn too. There are several people who are disliked by the children, (mainly Scout, on account of her first teacher,) but despite this they do not get twisted into worse than they are, or become depicted as monsters. They all stay realistic.
Earlier I said 'With the exception of Arthur Radley, you can easily imagine all of the characters as people.'. I made him out as an exception because even when he does come out in the open, he never feels quite real the way lesser characters, like Mrs. Dubose, do. He's always just sort of there. In the first part of the book he was always just a glamorized story enhanced by the creativity of a six year old and her two friends, so that dehumanizes him, in a sense, to the reader. By the time we do see him as a person it's such a quick moment that it doesn't have enough impact on that past impression part one left us with to really push it aside. What's even worse is that he then leaves, and like two or three pages later, the book ends!
But perhaps that was Harper Lee's intention. Perhaps most people did get a feel that he could really exist, or that he was a solid character the same way Atticus and Miss Maudie were. To me he just doesn't seem like a person in the book the way other side characters do. It's simply too rushed.
I don't like being forced to read things, so when it does happen it sort of puts a damper on the entire thing and makes me reluctant to really like it.
I liked TKAM for the same reason I like the other books I've been reading. The characters are not flat. With the exception of Arthur Radley, you can easily imagine all of the characters as people. The children, while they're children, are imaginative and rambunctious, just like children have a tendancy to be. The adults in the novel are also realistic. There are different types of them. There's the nice lady neighbor who's sort of like an aunt who enjoys the children's company and is someone they can turn too. There are several people who are disliked by the children, (mainly Scout, on account of her first teacher,) but despite this they do not get twisted into worse than they are, or become depicted as monsters. They all stay realistic.
Earlier I said 'With the exception of Arthur Radley, you can easily imagine all of the characters as people.'. I made him out as an exception because even when he does come out in the open, he never feels quite real the way lesser characters, like Mrs. Dubose, do. He's always just sort of there. In the first part of the book he was always just a glamorized story enhanced by the creativity of a six year old and her two friends, so that dehumanizes him, in a sense, to the reader. By the time we do see him as a person it's such a quick moment that it doesn't have enough impact on that past impression part one left us with to really push it aside. What's even worse is that he then leaves, and like two or three pages later, the book ends!
But perhaps that was Harper Lee's intention. Perhaps most people did get a feel that he could really exist, or that he was a solid character the same way Atticus and Miss Maudie were. To me he just doesn't seem like a person in the book the way other side characters do. It's simply too rushed.
