With 20-20 hindsight, one see why reviewers had problems with this book which is a first draft of the Pullizer Prize winner’s classic “To Kill A Mockingbird”.

It was dishonestly feted by the profit-driven publisher as a sequel.

So this a story of Southern manners, iconoclasm and coming of realization is often irritatingly naive precisely because the true craftswoman had not yet come into its own.

However her potential shines through every page

With the hyper cautious lenses required in politically correct South Africa one is amazed that the lamentable racism attributed to the heroine’s father is even given ink.

I like to think that growing up, starting work as a journalist and  coming of age  in the darkest part of apartheid has given me an understanding of the fear-based bigotry that drove much of the United States in the same period.

Their liberating period of hope and idealism came more than a decade before ours – indeed it was part of the inspiration for ours.

Our periods of disillusionment have disturbingly coincided.

This book is well worth reading because it is a first draft of history and the early work of one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

The post A prequel greedily presented as a sequel to an American classic appeared first on Jean-Jacques Cornish.