‘Go Set a Watchman’ by Harper Lee

“When you stopped running, Jean Louise, and turned around, that turn took fantastic courage. “

Every once in a while, a book that seemed to take decades to be published finally is. 

In 2013, Stephen King released his anticipated sequel to “The Shining,” “Doctor Sleep.” In 2014, Anne Rice added another chronicle to her vampire novels with “Prince Lestat.” This year, the most anticipated book thus far has been Harper Lee’s “Go Set a Watchman,” the sequel to her 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The New York Post reports that the book has sold over $1 million in copies since its publication. 

It’s back to Maycomb, Ala., for Jean Louise “Scout” Finch. She is visiting her hometown after a few years away in the big city of New York. At 26 years old, Jean Louise is reluctant to be back in the south. We catch up with a lot of the characters from “Mockingbird,” exploring their lives in their present and also in retrospect through many nostalgic flashbacks via Jean Louise. 

She arrives back home and is immediately put under the strain of her overbearing aunt Alexandra. Alexandra can not understand why Jean Louise never tried to fit in and why she does not want to move back home. Jean Louise seeks the comfort of her dear old friend Henry “Hank” Clinton, who has his own ideas of who Jean Louise should be and who also works closely with her father, Atticus Finch, in his law office. 

There is still a resonating conflict that takes precedent in Jean Louise’s life in her hometown. That of who she is versus who everyone expects her to be. Though she states many times that she would never fit in here in her hometown, she finds herself entertaining the idea. 

There are three themes happening in the novel simultaneously, the first being a young person’s need for wanderlust and travel and to strike out on one’s own and find a place in the world. Racism is a backdrop of things prevalent in the world at the time and eventually leads to the bigger theme at play, which is Jean Louise’s need of forging her own identity separate from her father. 

To Jean Louise, Atticus has always been a man larger than life — a god in the eyes of his daughter, a man who could do no wrong. In a turn of events, we see Atticus fall from grace, back to the frailty of a flawed human being. Jean Louise struggles to come to terms with her shattered sense of reality. In taking off her rose-colored glasses and seeing her father in a new light, she is forced to accept that he is just a man. A man with flaws like any other man. It seems that Jean Louise’s need to run from her hometown was almost a measure to save herself from the inevitable — that she would one day have to look upon her father without the wonder and innocence of a child.

“Go Set a Watchman” takes place during the tensions of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Without giving away specifics, I can say that the book has sparked a lot of debate and controversy about racism, segregation, politics and religious power in the civil rights movement of that day. 

There are rumors that Harper Lee has three more novels, though none have to do with the “To Kill a Mockingbird” storyline.

Talisha Blackburn is the young adult library specialist at Beardsley and Memorial Library. The Library is located at 40 Munro Place in Winsted. Visit the library online at www.beardsleyandmemorial.org to reserve this book. Or search the ebook catalog or the on site library catalog.