Go Set a Watchman received mixed reviews. Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times described Atticus' characterization as "shocking", as he "has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares [Scout's] horror and confusion".[16] Aside from this revelation, Kakutani notes that Go Set a Watchman is the first draft of Mockingbird and discusses how students of writing will find Watchman fascinating for that reason.[16] A reviewer for The Wall Street Journal described the key theme of the book as disillusionment.[30] Despite Atticus' bigotry in the novel, he wins a case similar to the one he loses in To Kill a Mockingbird.[31] Michelle Dean of The Guardian wrote that many reviewers, such as Michiko Kakutani, allowed their personal convictions and takes of the controversy that erupted before the publication to leak into the reviews. She defends the novel as a "pretty honest confession of what it was to grow up a whip-smart, outspoken, thinking white woman in the south... in a word, unpleasant", and stated that the book's bad reception is due to the "[shattering of] everyone's illusions...that Harper Lee was living in satisfied seclusion".[32]
Entertainment Weekly panned the book as "a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird" and said, "Though Watchman has a few stunning passages, it reads, for the most part, like a sluggishly paced first draft, replete with incongruities, bad dialogue, and underdeveloped characters".[33] "Ponderous and lurching", wrote William Giraldi in The New Republic, "haltingly confected, the novel plods along in search of a plot, tranquilizes you with vast fallow patches, with deadening dead zones, with onslaughts of cliché and dialogue made of pamphleteering monologue or else eye-rolling chitchat".[34] On the other hand, Dara Lind of Vox states that "it's ironic that the reception of Go Set a Watchman has been dominated by shock and dismay over the discovery that Atticus Finch is a racist, because the book is literally about Scout — who now goes by her given name, Jean Louise — ...[who] has been living in New York, and quietly assumed that her family back home is just as anti-segregationist as she is".[35] In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik commented that the novel could be seen as "a string of clichés", although he went on to remark that "some of them are clichés only because, in the half century since Lee's generation introduced them, they've become clichés; taken on their own terms, they remain quite touching and beautiful".[36] Maureen Corrigan in NPR Books called the novel "kind of a mess".[37] In The Spectator, Philip Hensher called Go Set a Watchman "an interesting document and a pretty bad novel", as well as a "piece of confused juvenilia".[38] "Go Set A Watchman is not a horrible book, but it's not a very good one, either", judged the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, citing among other flaws its "overly simplistic" plot.[39]
Alexandra Petri wrote in The Washington Post, "It is an inchoate jumble ... Go Set a Watchman is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good, or even a finished book. For the first 100 pages it lacks anything that could even charitably be described as a plot. ... [T]he writing is laughably bad. ... I flung the book down and groaned audibly and I almost did not pick it back up even though I knew I had fewer than 100 pages to go. ... This should not have been published. It’s 280 pages in desperate need of an editor. ... If you were anywhere in the vicinity of me when I was reading the thing, you heard a horrible bellowing noise, followed by the sound of a book being angrily tossed down. ..."[40] Contrastingly, Sam Sacks of The Wall Street Journal praised the book for containing "the familiar pleasures of Ms. Lee’s writing—the easy, drawling rhythms, the flashes of insouciant humor [and] the love of anecdote".[41]
Author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that "Harper Lee was a good writer. She wrote a lovable, greatly beloved book. But this earlier one, for all its faults and omissions, asks some of the hard questions To Kill a Mockingbird evades."[42]
The year it was released, the book won the Goodreads Choice Award in Fiction.[43]
