Harper Lee's second published novel, Go Set a Watchman, is available in paperback this month after igniting considerable controversy—and record-setting sales—when it was released in hardcover last year. The recently discovered novel offers an unsettling portrait of the Finch family, whom readers first met in Lee's classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. Written in the mid-1950s and simmering with the racial and political tensions of that time, Go Set a Watchman portrays Jean Louise Finch (aka Scout) as a 26-year-old who has come back to Maycomb, Alabama, from New York City to visit her father, Atticus. The return home proves to be a melancholy affair, as Jean Louise makes troubling discoveries about her family, community and the people she loves the most. As the past floods into the present, and Jean Louise looks back on her childhood, she finds herself questioning the truths and beliefs that provided the foundation for her life. Reading groups will find much to discuss in Lee's story of a young woman struggling to make sense of a world in flux.

BEHIND THE LENS
A mesmerizing blend of image and text, Sally Mann's memoir, Hold Still, is in a class by itself. In this luminous, forthright narrative, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the acclaimed photographer shares the story of her Southern childhood, tracks her evolution as an artist and looks back on her experiences as a wife and mother of three. From the dramatic accident that almost killed her young son, Emmett, to the uproar caused by the photographs of her children in the book Immediate Family (1992), Mann provides insights into her personal life and her aesthetic, which are tightly intertwined. Punctuating Mann's fluid narration are her own arresting images—photographs of her homestead in Virginia, family portraits old and new and scenes of the South. As precisely composed as one of her photos, this intimate memoir is a must-read for Mann's many fans and a work that's sure to inspire up-and-coming creatives, no matter the medium. Filled with quotes, notes, letters and other ephemera, it's a fascinating scrapbook from the life of an elusive artist.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
Beloved author Anne Tyler offers another poignant, true-to-life domestic drama in A Spool of Blue Thread. Spanning seven decades, this richly detailed novel tells the story of the Whitshank family, whose center is 72-year-old Abby. Married to Red, with whom she has raised four children, Abby looks back on the early days of her romance with him in the late 1950s, before they moved into their Baltimore home, a large, rambling house that seems to take on a life of its own as the novel unfolds. In this compelling family epic, readers will find many of the qualities they've come to treasure in Tyler's work—a sense of compassion, a flair for comedy and an unforgettable cast of characters that includes college-dropout Denny, the Whitshanks' directionless son. Tyler's 20th novel is the work of a writer at the height of her powers. 

 

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As every reader knows, Lee's second novel, from which her iconic To Kill a Mockingbird was spun 55 years ago, has just been published by Harper with considerable excitement and some still-shifting uncertainty, as reported by the New York Times, about how the manuscript was rediscovered. Lee's original work has feisty 26-year-old Jean Louise Finch, nicknamed Scout as a child and the basis for Mockingbird's beloved heroine, returning home from New York to Maycomb Junction, AL, post-Brown v. Board of Education and encountering strongly resistant states'-rights, anti-integrationist forces that include boyfriend Henry and, significantly, her father, Atticus Finch, Mockingbird's moral center. Readers shocked by that revelation must remember that there are now two Atticus Finches; the work in hand is not a sequel but served as source material for Lee's eventual Pulitzer Prize winner, with such reworked characters a natural part of the writing and editing processes. Even if one can imagine that the seeds of the older Atticus are there in the younger Atticus—and that's possible—these are different characters and different books. More significantly, the current work stands as you-are-there documentation of a specific time and place, contextualizing both Mockingbird and the very beginnings of the civil rights movement, and for that reason alone it's invaluable and recommended reading. Mockingbird's Atticus was right for 1960, just after the Little Rock integration crisis, with his defense of a wrongly accused African American making him a moral beacon and a lesson for all. Yet for many readers, even those who love and admire Mockingbird, it also smacked of white self-congratulation, and the current book is a rawer, more authentic representation of Southern sentiment at a tumultuous time, years removed from the solidly (and safely) segregationist era of Mockingbird. If Watchman is occasionally digressive or a bit much of a lecture, it's good enough to make one wish that Lee had written a dozen works. It's also a breathtaking read that will have the reader actively engaged and arguing with every character, including Jean Louise. In the end, despite Jean Louise's powerful articulation that the court had to rule as it did, that "we [whites] deserve everything we've gotten from the NAACP," and that Negroes (as the novel says) will rise and should rise, it's unsettling and, yes, disappointing that the confrontation between Jean Louise and Atticus is ultimately an engineered effort to make her stand up for herself and stop worshipping her father. That's not quite believable, and what's right gets a little lost in states' rights, which Jean Louise herself supports. At least she doesn't run back to New York, but did she really win her argument? The ugly things she hears around her are still being said today. VERDICT Disturbing, important, and not to be compared with Mockingbird; this book is its own signal work.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Reviewed by Louisa ErmelinoThe editor who rejected Lee's first effort had the right idea. The novel the world has been waiting for is clearly the work of a novice, with poor characterization (how did the beloved Scout grow up to be such a preachy bore, even as she serves as the book's moral compass?), lengthy exposition, and ultimately not much story, unless you consider Scout thinking she's pregnant because she was French-kissed or her losing her falsies at the school dance compelling. The book opens in the 1950s with Jean Louise, a grown-up 26-year-old Scout, returning to Maycomb from New York, where she's been living as an independent woman. Jean Louise is there to see Atticus, now in his seventies and debilitated by arthritis. She arrives in a town bristling from the NAACP's actions to desegregate the schools. Her aunt Zandra, the classic Southern gentlewoman, berates Jean Louise for wearing slacks and for considering her longtime friend and Atticus protégé Henry Clinton as a potential husband—Zandra dubs him trash. But the crux of the book is that Atticus and Henry are racist, as is everyone else in Jean Louise's old life (even her childhood caretaker, Calpurnia, sees the white folks as the enemy). The presentation of the South pushing back against the dictates of the Federal government, utilizing characters from a book that was about justice prevailing in the South through the efforts of an unambiguous hero, is a worthy endeavor. Lee just doesn't do the job with any aplomb. The theme of the book is basically about not being able to go home again, as Jean Louise sums it up in her confrontation with Atticus: "there's no place for me anymore in Maycomb, and I'll never be entirely at home anywhere else." As a picture of the desegregating South, the novel is interesting but heavy-handed, with harsh language and rough sentiments: "Do you want them in our world?" Atticus asks his daughter. The temptation to publish another Lee novel was undoubtedly great, but it's a little like finding out there's no Santa Claus.