Reading Go Set a Watchman feels wrong. Not because of the subject matter, but because of the experience. It’s a broken, inconsistent, only halfway-to-good effort that feels like the early draft it is. It reads like a book you should never have been allowed to read at all.
Watchman‘s reveals are more plot holes than plot twists. This novel might have been saved with some thoughtful revisions, but nothing of the sort ever happened (Lee herself hasn’t read Watchman since her lawyer discovered the manuscript in an archive last fall), so the changes between this book and Mockingbird stand out as dark inconsistencies and aren’t treated with the significance they should be. We hear in passing that the Tom Robinson trial actually resulted in an acquittal rather than a conviction, and that’s intriguing, but it’s unclear how that accounts for the differences in Scout and Atticus between the earlier novel and this one.
By Harper Lee (Harper)
