May I Say I Was Not That Impressed by "To Kill A Mockingbird"?

Let me explain my bias.  When in prison I decided that I was going to get right and truly serious about writing fiction, I decided I needed to get caught up with my reading. I said I was filling in the holes of my education. I went through the classics section of the prison library, and I also followed a list from Entertainment Weekly of the 100 Best Novels of All Time. To Kill A Mockingbird was on that list. I did not think it was that good. I felt it a quaint tale, no remarkable style.

Reading The Washington Post's Students hated ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Their teachers tried to dump it appealed to my bias. It also taught me there was more to the novel than what I understood.

Kimora Tornga, a 17-year-old of African and Korean descent, doesn’t know whether she wants to read “Mockingbird.”

Tornga, a Kamiak senior, remembers loving the play “A Raisin in the Sun” when she read it last school year, even though it had the n-word. The n-word can be justified in literature, she said, if the author “has it as a theme and it’s a moral,” teaching students how bad the word is.

She is reserving judgment on “Mockingbird”: “I need to be able to read it myself,” she said. But she — like many other Mukilteo students — will have to encounter the novel on her own time, now, not in school.

As far as anyone can determine, Freemon is the only teacher who dared assign the book in the school year following the challenge, she said. She taught the book in 2022-2023, feeling “lonely,” she said.

Emily Nelson-Doney, a White sophomore who took Freemon’s class that year, said she loved “Mockingbird” so much that she checked it out to read again — in graphic novel form — last month. She recalled her classmates as riveted by the book, too, especially by the moment when Scout and her father, Atticus Finch, face down a mob outside the jail. That scene spurred an intense class discussion about how a child’s innocence “helped fix the situation,” said Nelson-Doney, 16.

“It got into dark details, the hard truth of back then: how one person who was a White person could say one bad thing and a man, a person of color, would get in trouble for it,” she said of “Mockingbird.” She feels bad for students who didn’t read it: “They lost a good book.”

This year, the first year after Freemon’s retirement, no teacher in the Mukilteo district had assigned the book as of late October, she said.

“Students are going to lose out,” Freemon said.

Mariner English teacher Salcedo said that other things have been lost, too: “Like trust, and a belief that everyone is on the same team.”

Still, superintendent Alison Brynelson said she thinks there were positive outcomes. Because of what happened, she said, the district held two trainings on how to teach controversial materials, hosted by nonprofit “Facing History & Ourselves” — trainings Salcedo had recommended and was pleased to see adopted. The Instructional Materials Committee added two student members, endowed with the power to shape the curriculum. The district also updated its policies for book challenges, clarifying that teachers have the right to pick supplemental class materials, although the board must approve core curriculum.
But Brynelson admitted a feeling of ongoing tension.

Yes, how it was back then - and what to stay away from in the future. But is that enough to make a great novel? 

sch 11/9