Having finished this, I couldn't really understand why I'd never read this before. It's a popular GCSE text, it's got a title which rolls pretty neatly off the tongue and it's so similar to To Kill a Mockingbird that it would seem the natural next choice for anybody to recommend to you. I feel almost let down by my English teacher that this didn't happen before I was twenty-six.
No matter, it was a rare find when I came to it. I enjoyed almost every page and found so much truth and wisdom in the pages. Like Harper Lee's classic, it deals with black segregation in the 1930s, only this time from a black girl's perspective. It was beautifully sparingly written and made me wonder why more people don't rave about this when they rave about Atticus and co (though Atticus totally deserves raving about - he's the Man).
Perhaps the weirdest thing about Roll of Thunder is that it's part two of a trilogy. It seems really odd for people to have decided to stick a middle book on so many reading lists with next to no reference to the other two parts. It would be like whacking Catching Fire on the curriculum and ignoring The Hunger Games. I sort of want to see what part one is like but it seems to be about trees; I struggle to empathise with trees.
But a really good read nonetheless.
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