Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my all-time favorite books. I enjoyed Go Set a Watchman very much and I'm thankful readers are provided with somewhere to turn after TKAM. However, I forced myself to read GSAW as a completely separate entity as TKAM because I knew there was no was I could read it as a "sequal" or whatever. I read it as a different book with different characters because I wanted to keep my TKAM characters exactly as they were. Doing such enabled me to thoroughly enjoy GSAW and take many things away from the story that Lee spins in this novel. It really is quite brilliant and a very touching piece of work. The themes of this novel are ones that cannot be ignored, and (similar to TKAM) there are many lines and phrases that when I read, I had to put the book down for a few seconds in order to simply think about it. Many people struggled reading this book because the actions are so unlike the Scout we knew through TKAM, which is why I made myself read GSAW as a whole new book without any connections. It was Lee's writing, through and through, which was one of the things I originally loved about TKAM, so this helped me thoroughly enjoy GSAW. I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars, because there was still a part of me reading with TKAM in mind, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it. Also, because this was written early on in Lee's life, it's easy to see how her writing changed and developed (great when reading TKAM, not so great when reading GSAW). The worst thing I think one can do when reading this book, is consider it TKAM book 2. Read it as a separate story, and you'll see the greatness Lee was trying to give to the world.