Books: About Life & Little Girls

To KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (296 pp.)—Harper Lee—Lipplncotf ($3.95).

Clearly, Scout Finch is no ordinary five-year-old girl—and not only because she amuses herself by reading the financial columns of the Mobile Register, but because her nine-year-old brother Jem allows her to tag along when he and Dill Harris try to make Boo Radley come out.

Boo is the Radley son who has not shown his face outside the creaky old family house for 30 years and more, probably because he has "shy ways," but possibly —an explanation the children much prefer—because his relatives have chained him to his bed. Dill has the notion that...