Mockingbird Summer

Content Warning: This section discusses racism, racial violence, and rape.

In 1964, Kate “Corky” Corcoran is 13 years old and lives in segregated High Cotton, a small town in Texas. The story begins following a series of important events in American History such as the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The following years bring more changes and upheaval with the passing of civil rights legislation, protests against American military involvement in Vietnam, the rise of 1960s counterculture, and the Women’s Liberation Movement.

The narrator announces that the summer of 1964 is the last of Corky’s childhood. Sit-in protests, a softball game, and her friendship with America, a young Black girl in High Cotton, bring “a small miracle” in her town and change Corky forever (xi). The town librarian’s recommendation of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird catalyzes Corky’s coming-of-age arc.

Corky enters the town’s library along with her dog, Roy Rogers, who follows her everywhere. Corky, a tomboy who loves the library and reads every book she can, makes friends with the librarian who gives her Harper Lee’s To Kill a