Not good enough

Go Set A Watchman
by Harper Lee
read by Sissy Spacek

Golly, I am exceedingly conflicted. Parts were deep, insightful, and really really touching. And other parts were repetitive and mostly pointless. I think what the book needed was editing down to the length of a novella.

I suspect that some of the pointless parts were intended as background for stories to be fleshed out in later chapters which she never wrote. Some of the stories of her (Scout's) life were funny, or charming, but without meaning to me. Was the author trying to add depth with the long story of the falsies that Scout wore to the prom and which later ended up causing all the schoolmates to unite against the principal?  If so, it's past me.

And the repetition was murder. When Jean Louise sat through a meeting of the town citizens group with a Klan-ish kind of politician as a speaker, it would have been more than sufficient to relate four or five of his hurtful, prejudiced, and outright cruel talking points. But Ms. Lee went on for what seemed like fifty or sixty of them. I don't know how many--I quit listening and skipped to the end of his speech.

And when the young women at Jean Louise's party started in with their own versions of the small-minded, petty and evil observations about Negroes, she did the same. That chapter went on so long that I simply skipped it after the first two.

Thus the conflict. There are some really good things in this book. But it's hard to find them amidst all the chaff.