Harper Lee will release her first book since To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill A Mockingbird is one of my all-time favorite books. I was completely shocked this morning when it was announced that Harper Lee was coming out with a followup. Go Set a Watchman, which will be released in July, is essentially a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, despite being completed first. From Lee:

“It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman and I thought it a pretty decent effort. My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel (what became `To Kill a Mockingbird’) from the point of view of the young Scout.”

The premise of the book is that Scout (Jean Louise Finch) has returned to Maycomb from New York to visit her father, Atticus. She is forced to grapple with issues both personal and political as she tries to understand her father’s attitude toward society, and her own feelings about the place where she was born and spent her childhood.

While I don’t think anything can live up to Mockingbird, I’m absolutely looking forward to reading this.