I feel just sick about Harper Lee's latest depiction of Atticus Finch in her sequel! Thank you and my condolences, Rich Smith, for doing the reading for me. I'm glad I didn't buy Go Set a Watchman; instead, I saw a DVD copy of the classic 1962 Oscar-winning film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird (that won Gregory Peck the Best Actor nod for his brilliant portrayal of Atticus Finch) and bawled my brains out. It's especially sad to think that after 55 years and a Pulitzer Prize, the only direction after a pinnacle is downward? Harper, Harper---what on Earth happened?

I loved the book and think it was a more complex study of Southern race relations than TKAMB. It's well-written and powerful. Read the book not this review!

so much vitriol, what is this the third scathing review from you? we get it. you hated it. it ruined your childhood. let it go, move on.

Actually I think he's saying don't read the book because it's a poorly-written unedited manuscript.
If you read the second-to-last paragraph he says the complicating of the character of Atticus is not a bad thing in and of itself. And it strikes me as maybe realistic. Old people tend to be more scared and xenophobic than their idealist younger selves.

I think anyone with a conservative family who isn't conservative has an experience of growing up and realizing your own flesh and blood have some pretty backward ideas and how disheartening and frustrating it is, so I'm glad she killed the sacred cow. Shame it wasn't in a better book.

Why does it suck that Scout is kinda racist? Isn't that kind of realistic? Isn't it better that we complicate our ideas about 'good white folks'? I'm confused (in fact it seems like you are confused too) about whether you are objecting to this book because it is poorly written or because it ruins the imaginary simplicity that Scout and Atticus represent for so many white liberal readers.

What puts me off reading it is the questions about whether or not Harper Lee signed off on it with full (or any) understanding of it. The idea that someone just saw it as a found, winning scratch-off ticket from which they could benefit is disturbing. Even worse if it's a first draft, and Lee never meant for it to be seen in that form.

I've seen negative reviews besides Rich Smith's, but can only think of one positive one so far.

I personally think this book is more feminist than about race. Jean Louise is a strong female character just like the younger Scout. Lee uses her voice as the only color blind person in a very deep South culture with hints of what her generation tried to change. The ending is about forgiveness within a family, not an endorsement of the prevailing attitudes. This is not To Kill a Mockingbird and should be judged on its own merit.

@2 bitchslap: Okay, fair enough: I've neither bought nor actually read a copy of Go Set a Watchman. But the plot of the new book so alters my original beloved childhood image of Lee's Southern lawyer and prominent Maycomb, Alabama community figure, Atticus Finch that the older Jean Louise and Atticus, depicted 20 years later do come off (for me, anyway) as feeling like a---bitchslap.
@8 The Zoo: I share your additional reasons for not buying Lee's new book. This sequel after so many years makes me think of all the classic films made into disastrous remakes (i.e.: The Wizard of Oz, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, et al.). The fact that Go Set a Watchman was published in its originally unedited first draft form made me wonder, too. This doesn't sound like something someone as private and careful as Harper Lee would agree to publish as is, especially when her legally protective older sister, Alice (who lived to age 103 and died recently), was still alive.

@9: Another point well made--Go Set a Watchman is indeed, not To Kill a Mockingbird. That's indisputable. It's a continuation of the original story line set twenty years later, in the early 1950s. I get that. Maybe Harper Lee is in retrospect trying to make a statement of attempted social change in the Deep South.
I just don't read or see racism anywhere in Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (whereas vulgarity and racial bigotry are revoltingly splattered all over Bob Ewell by highly descriptive comparison)--both in the first book and its 1962 Oscar-winning screen adaptation, or any sense in the altering of Atticus Finch into being newly cast as a racist in the second book, however fictional the character is at the author's discretion.

Remember, this is not a second book...it was her original telling of the story. To Kill a Mockingbird comes from a more mature and possibly more hopeful author

@12: Wait.......Harper Lee had actually penned Go Set a Watchman first BEFORE To Kill a Mockingbird, and the unedited draft of Watchman was hidden away all these decades? Wow. I guess I'm just stunned because the characters for me are suddenly in a whole new light.

Atticus was always racist. People, like Scout, simply were blind to it. Plus, the movie sanitized the book's worst parts.

http://jezebel.com/atticus-was-always-a-…

Scout in TKAMB: “Cecil Jacobs asked me one time if Atticus was a Radical. When I asked Atticus, Atticus was so amused I was rather annoyed, but he said he wasn’t laughing at me. He said, ‘You tell Cecil I’m about as radical as Cotton Tom Heflin.’”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Thom…

I might lend this review more credence if you would explain WHY the book is bad. Right now your main problems are 'Atticus is portrayed as a flawed human being' and 'the characters have racist beliefs, which the author acknowledging is equal to supporting because people in the deep south in the 1950's should feel and act like white college kids in the 2015'.

Really if you want to review the book then review the book. Right now it looks like your desperately nitpicking and trying to find some way the book is awful, even if you have to make it up. Like those creeps on Reddit who scream and moan how 'X' is being ruined because women are involved.

The reviewer comes across as a sanctimonious ideologue, for whom the complexities of real life and morality must be reduced to politically correct slogans.