I Kill the Mockingbird by Paul Acampora (review)

In an effort to get people to read To Kill a Mockingbird, their late teacher’s favorite book, rising high school freshman Lucy and her friends Elena and Michael come up with a brilliant plan. They’ll travel to every bookstore and library in a fifty-mile radius of their small Connecticut town and pull copies of the book, hiding them elsewhere in the store and thereby increasing demand of the book by limiting its supply—without technically committing any crimes. Naming their conspiracy “I Kill The Mockingbird,” the trio sets up a website and social media campaign, and soon the plan goes viral with nerd-king Wil Wheaton tweeting about it and pranksters across the nation joining in. The plot is breezily amiable, and it provides a lighthearted focal point for an otherwise emotionally challenging summer for young Lucy. Besides having the normal anxieties about entering high school, she is also confused by her new romantic feelings for her childhood friend Michael, and she’s still reeling from her mother’s successful bout with a near-fatal cancer. The banter among the three whip-smart friends would make John Green proud, and they manage to come off as intelligent but not precocious, witty without being unrealistic. Lucy is very much a young fourteen in some ways (a chaste kiss with Michael seems awfully daring in her eyes), but her sharp observations regarding her Catholic faith, her mother’s mortality, and the shifting dynamics of adolescent friendships reveal an age-appropriate wisdom. You won’t have to hide any copies of this to create demand—just read the passage in which the kids dub themselves literary terrorists and you’ll have a hit.