![]() Over the summer, Jem and Scout learn important lessons about race (black people don't much like white people their black cook Calpurnia has a whole life and world of her own), and they also learn that Tom Robinson's been accused of raping a white woman. While a sleepy Scout stands on the street trying not to freeze, someone drapes a blanket over her shoulders without her noticing: turns out that someone was Boo Radley, and it freaks Scout out that he was right there and she didn't even notice.Īt school, Scout gets flak from her classmates because her father, a lawyer, has taken on a new client, a black man named Tom Robinson. That winter, disaster strikes: Miss Maudie's house catches on fire and burns to the ground. Nathan Radley (Boo's brother) has filled in the knothole with cement. ![]() This lasts until the following fall, when they find that Mr. She tells Jem about it, and soon they find other treasures hidden in the same place, including finely-carved soap figurines of Scout and Jem themselves. One day she notices something odd: a couple of pieces of gum stuck in a hole in the tree. The Radley Place is in between Scout's house and school, so she has to go by it every day, usually at top speed. Every summer, Scout and Jem are joined by Dill Harris, who shares their obsession with the local haunted house, the Radley Place, and the boogeyman who lives there, Boo Radley.įall comes, Dill leaves and Scout starts school. Like the Finch family: scrappy tomboy Scout Finch, her older brother Jem Finch and their father Atticus Finch. Few people move in, fewer move out, so it's just the same families doing the same things for generation after generation. The place: The small town of Maycomb, Alabama, finalist for Most Boring Town in America. The book: To Kill a Mockingbird (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and kind-of-a-big-deal piece of American literature). She realizes that once you get to know them, most people are good and kind no matter what they seem like on the outside.Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird: Novel Summary No one is lesser or better than anyone else because they're all people. Through the events of those two years, Scout learns that no matter their differences or peculiarities, the people of the world and of Maycomb County are all people. Boo Radley returns home never to be seen again. In order to protect Boo's privacy, the sheriff decides that Bob Ewell fell on his own knife while he was struggling with Jem. ![]() After Jem's arm is badly broken, their ghostly neighbor, Boo Radley, rescues Scout and her brother. On the way home from a pageant, Bob Ewell attacks Jem and Scout in the darkness. It seems that the case is finally over and life returns to normal until Halloween night. Tom Robinson is sent to a work prison to await another trial, but before Atticus can get him to court again, Tom is shot for trying to escape the prison. Despite Ewell's vow to avenge himself against Atticus, Atticus doesn't view Ewell as any real threat. The only real enemy that Atticus made during the case was Bob Ewell, the trashy white man who accused Tom Robinson of raping his daughter. Scout and Jem are forced to bear the slurs against their father and watch with shock and disillusionment as their fellow townspeople convict an obviously innocent man because of his race. The case is the biggest thing to hit Maycomb County in years and it turns the whole town against Atticus, or so it seems. When he takes on a case that pits innocent, black Tom Robinson against two dishonest white people, Atticus knows that he will lose, but he has to defend the man or he can't live with himself. Scout and Jem's God-like father, Atticus, is a respected and upstanding lawyer in small Maycomb County. However, these brushes with the neighborhood ghost result in a tentative friendship over time and soon the Finch children realize that Boo Radley deserves to live in peace, so they leave him alone. They go through plan after plan, but nothing draws him out. Dill and Jem become obsessed with the idea of making Boo Radley, the neighborhood recluse, come out of his home. The summer when Scout was six and Jem was ten, they met Dill, a little boy who spent the summer with his aunt who lived next door to the Finches. Through their neighborhood meanderings and the example of their father, they grow to understand that the world isn't always fair and that prejudice is a very real aspect of their world no matter how subtle it seems. To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age story of Scout Finch and her brother, Jem, in 1930's Alabama.
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