What a great re-read. This was required reading in high school and I remember reading it, but I had little-to-no recollection of the story other than the major plot points. This re-read counts for my Back to the Classics, a bonus for my Mount TBR and The Classics Club reading challenges.
Before you read my review, try to find the To Kill A Mockingbird review in the list of 19 Depressing One Star Reviews of Classic Literature on Buzzfeed and then once the shock has fully settled in you can come back and read my review.
As bad as the review is, it’s not necessarily wrong in many aspects; this novel is a very specific and very short novel, but I would not go anywhere near so far as the person who wrote the review. I can easily see where someone would not be impressed with the book for its slow pace, but that’s what I love about it. Lee sets the setting, and thus the book, up perfectly:
“People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything. A Day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.” (5)
So you can’t say you weren’t warned, I mean come on its page FIVE. However, where I disagree is the characters and their one dimension-ness according to the reviewer.
This was a surprising read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Unlike many of the ‘classics’ I’ve read the writing style and even the vernacular speech patterns were easy to read and kept the story constantly moving forward. This book counts for my Mount TBR and Back to the Classics reading challenges and is also on my 
I’ve wanted to read this since a book group I was in when I first moved to Boston read it. They read it before I joined and I thought it sounded interesting. So keeping with my theme of expanding my reading (and apparently reading a lot more nonfiction) I requested it from the local library.
I’m not sure about the rest of you, but in High School, one of my APÂ literature courses required that we learn a portion of the prologue in Middle English. Now rather than delight you all with a ridiculous video of me reciting it (I can still do the first 10-15 lines or so from memory), you’ll just have to use your imagination.
Yay for another book that counts for multiple challenges (Mount TBR, Back to the Classics and The Classics Club)! (It’s a doozy, sorry for the length!)