November 2015

A lovely, cosy meeting was shared on Sunday (along with some homemade cake!) Thanks to Joy for running things in my absence (I can't believe I missed the cake!)

Overall, the Bookworms were disappointed with our read for October which was Harper Lee's 'Go Set A Watchman' (see Joy's review below) and are looking forward to the more promising French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles. We'll be meeting on Sunday December 6th to discuss it over a Christmas meal and a drink (or two!)
If you'd like to join us, please drop me an email at nantwichbookworms@gmail.com for details as we'll be in a different location to usual.

Happy reading,
Kate


Joy's Review of Harper Lee's 'Go Set A Watchman':

We read the hotly-anticipated sequel to Harper Lee’s classic and much loved 'To Kill a Mockingbird' this month. 'Go Set a Watchman' sees Lee’s protagonist Scout return to Maycomb from New York on a trip that shakes her once, unshakable relationship with the rock that is her father – Atticus Finch.

The reader is reunited with favourite characters from To Kill a Mockingbird fifty-five years after its original publication date and set some twenty years after the original story. However, a lot can change in twenty years (let alone 55) and the transformation of the characters left us more than a little disappointed.

Scout, or Jean Louise as she is now called, is no longer our narrator but our whiny, sanctimonious, sweaty protagonist who’s illusion of her father, ‘the moral conscious of 20th Century America’ is shattered when she witnesses him condoning views such as negroes ‘mongrelising the race’. And if Scout’s illusion is shattered, then we are left standing in the shards of disappointment.

The story was enjoyable until the last third when we felt it lost it’s direction and became a complex stream of political consciousness, that was very niche to Southern American states and unfortunately lost on many non-American readers. It also had none of the tightness of To Kill a Mockingbird, little of the wit and skill that Lee’s writing demonstrates in her first masterpiece and in fact it seems as though it is written by a different person!

Maybe expectations were too high, or maybe there was a good reason it was locked in a safe deposit box for years. Either way, thumbs down from the Worms.