Don't. Just don't "Go Set a Watchman"

More than two years after the release of "Go Set a Watchman," I still can't bring myself to finish reading it. The writing is more juvenile than that in Harper Lee's classic "To Kill a Mockingbird," as is the character development, pacing and well, everything else.

I get the sense that Harper Lee, who herself moved from her small Alabama hometown to New York City as a young woman, wanted to portray all the complex emotions a young woman would feel about her hometown and Southern racial tensions after living independently in a large Northern city. Should she move back home to care for an aging father? Should she relax her dating standards now that she is -- by her small town's standards -- an old maid? How would a long-time African-American housekeeper respond to a white woman she helped raise as racial tensions flare? How can she navigate this emotionally fraught landscape as an adult who doesn't really want to be there?

All good meaty questions. And yet, I had a hard time reading it.

Page after page, it's asking questions and providing no answers.

Widely touted as a second novel by Harper Lee, it's really a rough draft that a painstaking editor helped Lee mold into the classic we now know. The New York Times' Jonathan Mahler tells us how a 31-year-old Lee, just six years older than her protagonist, delivered "Go Set a Watchman" to a publishing house that bought it -- and launched Lee into the hands a veteran editor Tay Hohoff.

Mahler writes:

But as Ms. Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, “more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel.” During the next couple of years, she led Ms. Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Just as little Scout had several wise but flawed adults who guided her through her early childhood, this story had several hands shaping it into a masterpiece. The final product, though focused on a very specific time and place, has a timeless quality about it. It takes us there and helps us understand.

But how can Atticus Finch, who spoke so eloquently about preventing harm of something that caused no harm itself when he defended a black man against false rape charges, later speak some of the words attributed to him in "Go Set a Watchman"?

Harper Lee's literary skills, though great, just hadn't developed enough to illustrate it through prose. Releasing "Watchman" undoubtedly provided a great tool to scholars interested in editing processes and development but it did little for readers, both casual readers and those who held "Mockingbird" dear.

(Goodreads readers disagree with me, though, as they chose it as one of the best books of 2015.)