To Kill a Mockingbird
By: Harper Lee / Narrated By: Sissy Spacek
Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
A reSOUNDingly good book becomes a Heart-Melter with Spacek doing the honors!!!
Here’s the tragedy: In 7th grade, our English teacher read our class a snippet of one of his favorite books: To Kill a Mockingbird. He chose the scene where Atticus has to shoot the rabid dog. It did NOT strike me as memorable! YAWN…
So it wasn’t until m’ husband SHAMED me about my ignorance that I took on reading this American Classic. Dude! Laughed, cried, felt outrage, felt grief. Loved it loved it loved it.
Then I discovered audiobooks, saw this on Sale, purchased it in a heartbeat. …and then promptly forgot about it.
So it wasn’t until this month, September of 2021—Audiobook Accomplice’s 3-year Anniversary of Existence—that I decided to celebrate by giving fellow Accomplice Faves a good Listen. Yessss, this audiobook came up for more than one Accomplice.
And good golly gosh, Sissy Spacek makes this already fantastic story a total masterpiece. Haven’t read the recently published “sequel” and don’t wanna, so I’ll just sit right here and let how WONderful this all was wash over m’self.
Need I say what it’s all about? Young Scout and big brother Jem are being raised by Atticus, their father who’s a trifle older than all their friends’ fathers. On his own, he strives to teach his children how to be good, decent human beings, capable of thinking for themselves even if it means not conforming, capable of comporting themselves with dignity and treating all those in the world around them with respect.
The first part of the book is a childhood in the South, with its rules and assumptions, with its treatment of poverty (Some poor folks have a great detail of pride; some poor folks are just out to use and misuse). There is a hierarchy, and Black folks and white folks have… an understanding of just where everyone stands within the fold. Jem is young and knows how to play; Scout is just a weeeee bit of a handful what with her always questioning things, what with her having SUCH opinions.
Then we get to where the sleepy little town wakes up, and life starts getting… well, the true colors of the inhabitants start showing up in very ugly ways. Atticus takes on as lawyer for a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, and suddenly those who were friends and neighbors are sneering and jeering. The usual playground taunts take on a bitter edge, because it ain’t just schoolchildren hurling the N word around.
What will Atticus teach his children about justice? Can he teach them about being honorable in the face of such ugliness and adversity? This rolls into the final section of the book, where Atticus discovers that even he can be surprised by anger, hatred, and his fellow man’s thirst for vengeance.
And did I mention how actress of note, Sissy Spacek, is stuPENdous? She carries the entire book, inhabits the souls of each character, makes Scout’s voice tick this way, then that way, really capturing Scout’s feistiness, her innocence in the face of neighbors, now a mob bent on murder, their idea of justice. Spacek begins the book in lazy and leisurely tones, a Southern Summer kinda pace, then picks it all up and brings out the most heartrending denouement imaginable. Then she slows it down, as tho’ Scout has just had a good cry and is ready to pick herself up, become a proper Southern lady, accepting and guiding the lost, the newly heroic, back to a place of refuge.
AWESOME all around.
One of those chortle aloud books; one of those makes ya think books; one of those just cried m’ eyes out books. And what can be more wonderful than THAT?!
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