I thought that the book A Lesson Before Dying was all right overall. I think Ernest Gaines did a good job with the plot but the idea of the book was not to interesting to me. A book about a black man becoming a man on his way to the electric chair is a very dull plot to me. I give Gaines credit for making the book semi-interesting even though the plot was terrible. Personally after reading Things Fall Apart and Song of Solomon I was looking for a little more action in this book. Those two books were ten times better than A Lesson Before Dying so I can say that I was probably expecting too much.
A Lesson Before Dying has a superb depiction of the theme "you can’t judge a book by its cover". Grant went to help Jefferson with a notion that Jefferson was sewer trash and he would not learn anything from this situation. In the end Grant was wrong because he learned a lot from his short relationship with Jefferson. Grant had certain feelings for Jefferson he never had for a ma
There were also some parts of A Lesson Before Dying that I did not like. They should have had more background on each of the characters. I never figured out where Tante Lou knew Aunt Emma from or where Grant met Vivian. These things are not necessary but they add to the story. I also think they could have gone into more detail about Grant and Lou’s relationship. I wanted to know what happened to Grant’s parents and just how close were they. There is a lot of background information in the book that remains a mystery to me.
n before. They became real close friends and talked about a lot of things. I really like how they portrayed this theme throughout the book.
In the book each character had their own characteristics and personality. There was something special about each character in the book. Each of them had their strong points and weak points for example Grant was always running away from his problems. There were a lot of things in his life that he could not handl