The Mockingbird Next Door

I've been reading The Mockingbird Next Door by Marja Mills off and on this week--and I heartily do not recommend this book.

I was telling Carlene this morning as we were driving to McDonalds for our morning drinks that I suspected that it was not approved by Harper Lee--and sure enough, I read on the Internet this morning that she did not.

Unlike the wonderful book, My Life in Middlemarch (that I wrote about earlier), this is a book that lacks substance.  I could have probably written it, little as I know about Harper Lee!

Supposedly Marja Mills was a writer for the Tribune and she moved to Monroeville, Alabama, to get to know Harper (called Nellie by her friends) and her sister Alice (who practiced law as their father did in Monroeville.)

But the book is much throat-clearing and repetition of facts, and it doesn't reveal any conversations of substance.  In the end, we know more about Marja, her personality, and her lupus than we get to know about Harper Lee.  And yet the book--due to much curiosity about the Lees--is on the New York Times Best Seller list.

There is much interest in the South this summer--what with Lee's Go Set A Watchman's release, the events in South Carolina, and all the talk about racial relations in the South. But this is not the book to read to find out more about the author or Monroeville, Alabama.