Paul Acampora. I Kill the Mockingbird. New York: Macmillan, 2014. Print.

I Kill the Mockingbird is a lot of fun. It is full of clever repartee and observations—young adult style—and the characters in the story are having a lot fun themselves.

I Kill the Mockingbird is told by Lucy who is finishing eighth grade as her mother is finishing chemotherapy. Her father happens to be principal of the Catholic grammar school she is graduating from. Her best friends are her neighbor Michael and classmate Elena. The three of them are friends in part because they all like to read. Readers will get a kick out of the story because there are references to many works of literature from the Bible to Cory Doctorow.

Elena’s Uncle Mort, her legal guardian, owns an independent bookstore in a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut. One of their summer reading books is To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that they have all read but don’t mind re-reading. They want to help out Uncle Mort’s business by cooking up a scheme that looks like To Kill a Mockingbird is being banned or attacked so that Uncle Mort will sell more copies.

As summer vacation begins, they start visiting bookstores and libraries within transit bus distance and placing the copies of the novel on other shelves where they do not belong. As any librarian will tell you, a mis-shelved book is as good as lost.

They also put flyers on the racks of the bookstores and libraries with the words “I kill the mockingbird.” Word starts spreading. They set up a web site Ikillthemockingbird.com, and the prank goes viral. By August there are copycats all over the country.

Their stunt grows out of their control. They are glad of one thing: Their ultimate goal—to get people reading more—seems to be working.

Lucy and her friends and family are quotable. While Lucy has not completely made up her mind, her father is a committed Catholic, as one might guess from his job. (Maybe a bit like Scout who has not made up her mind but whose father Atticus is a committed Methodist who reads Lorenzo Dow for pleasure?) Lucy is still wrestling with Friday’s question: If God is good why is there evil? But her parents display adult wisdom and irony.

Her father says, “Life is a gift. Going to church is like a thank-you note.” (28)

For understandable reasons, Lucy worries about her mother’s health. Her mother favors junk food. When her mother says that she would like a hot dog, Lucy tries to dissuade her of that idea.

“Hot dogs? Why don’t we just go buy a bag of chemicals so that you can gobble it up with a spoon?”

“We did that,” says Mom. “It was called chemotherapy. It saved my life.” (111-112)

When the three friends are coming up with things to do to pursue their kill-the-mockingbird plan, Elena makes a suggestion.

“How about we go online and start a rumor that To Kill a Mockingbird is violent and lewd?” she suggests.

“The story’s got rape, murder, lynching, and rabies,” I remind her. “There’s a man named Boo, an old lady drug addict, and a kid dressed as a pork chop. How are we going to top that?” (105,106)

There is much more. Michael has to move up to the next level of the baseball league because some of the managers think that he must be older than he is because he is so good. Lucy has developed a crush on Michael, but how do you approach someone who is almost like a brother? And then there is the axe-wielding Santa, the attempted book burning, and the memory of everyone’s favorite English teacher, Mr. Nowak, known by all including himself as Fat Bob.

One subplot involves a conflict with the manager of the nearby nationally franchised bookstore that might remind people of The Shop Around the Corner or its remake, You’ve Got Mail.

This is a gem. It might turn more middle schoolers into readers.

P.S. I do have one criticism of the book, one which I consider serious. The bird on the book’s cover and the one depicted on the illustrations of the I Kill the Mockingbird flyers look nothing like a real mockingbird. It looks like a cross between a bluebird and a chickadee.

I noted the same problem with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie where what was supposed to be a snipe looked like a crow. Don’t the cover artists try to find out what their subject looks like? I did notice that at least the bird on the cover of Pulitzer winner The Goldfinch is indeed a European Goldfinch.