Sissy Spacek takes one of the great American southern novels
How is the novel?
Sissy Spacek takes one of the great American southern novels, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee to an even more sublime level by perfectly becoming the narrator of the novel, Scout Finch.  Scout is only eight years old and the Great Depression is ongoing in Maycomb, Alabama.  Her father, Atticus, is a pivotal man in their town as he is the fairest lawyer in town.  Spacek does all the voices of these remarkable characters and they come even more alive for us.  The Finches are fortunate in this town as they are making it through the Depression in genteel if not affluent fashion.  The town is made of people like the Finches; and then what would be known today as poor white trash; and finally the blacks who still have decades to wait for racial equality to appear.  However, small town America provides certain basics in the 1930s. No one starves or is homeless yet vivid inequalities exist.  Also, disabilities are kept in your own home, shuttered up so that other people can't see your differences.  Boo Radley is one of these different, disabled people and Scout is fascinated by him as the Radleys live on her street. Boo will come to intersect with a terrible legal injustice which occurs in the town, a rape trial with a black man as the defendant and a poor white trash girl as the accuser.  Atticus Finch is the black man's lawyer.  But this novel is about so much more than a trial.  Lee and Spacek nail the universal frailties and strengths of all of us as human beings in her novel. Those haven't changed one iota between the Great Depression and present day. I enjoyed the movie and the novel when I was a kid and I did not revisit the work until recently as this audiobook.  It was a wonderful way to experience it all again in a new medium. If anyone who resists reading needs to learn this book for school, this audio version could be the perfect solution. 