It dawned on me recently that I might be the only person in America over the age of fifteen who hasn’t read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.   Sure, I know the names Scout, and Atticus Finch, and even Boo Radley (who lent his name to a great British band of the 1990’s).  But I hadn’t read the book, and I hadn’t seen the movie.  But we had a copy on our bookshelf, and my wife recently re-read it and seemed to enjoy it.  So I decided to give it a shot.

It is absolutely a coincidence that I had just finished Toney Earley’s Jim the Boy, also a book that centered on a young southerner during the Great Depression.  If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that’s my new favorite sub-genre.  But it really was a coincidence.  Not to say, though, that as I read To Kill a Mockingbird, Jim the Boy wasn’t clearly in the front of my mind, and that I couldn’t help but look for similarities and differences between the two.  And overall, while both are great books, I can’t say that there’s a whole lot of similarity between them; Lee’s and Earley’s writing styles are very different, the books were written forty-some years apart, and the stories they tell are drastically different.  Certain themes are definitely present in both: racism, rural poverty, and other blights that haunted this country at that time.  And both mention “haints”, a word that I had never seen or heard before and had to look up (it basically means a ghost).

But while Jim the Boy is simply a captivating and engaging tale of one year in one boy’s life, To Kill a Mockingbird is really a deeper story about how these negative elements manifested themselves in the South at that time.  I have to admit that I almost gave up on this book because the first half of it was pretty uneventful.  I’m not a particularly patient reader, and Lee certainly takes her sweet time setting the stage for the characters and events that will take place in the second half of the book.  But I persevered, and I’m glad I did.

By the way, going back to my first sentence above, I’m not going to tell you anything about what happens in this book, because I’m assuming you already know.