Book review: Sycamore Row by John Grisham

John Grisham, Sycamore Row, book review, new books, legal thriller, A Time to Kill In Luke 19, a rich man climbs a Sycamore tree to get a closer look at Jesus who is passing through the city of Jericho. Inspired to acts of justice after Jesus visits him for lunch, the man, Zaccheus, gives away much of his wealth to those he has previously robbed as a tax collector.

In John Grisham's latest legal thriller, Sycamore Row, a rich man climbs a Sycamore tree and hangs himself, and there ensues an almighty court battle over how he has divided his estate. I'll say no more about Zaccheus only that Grisham may well have been inspired by this very gospel story....

Sycamore Row is billed as a sequel to A Time To Kill, being set in the same small southern community of Clanton, Ford County, with same lawyer Jake Brigance in the pivotal legal role.

Those who have read A Time to Kill, or seen the movie, will at times find it hard to fit the smouldering performances of Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock, with the somewhat subdued and more nuanced characters Grisham depicts in this story.

Although there are no direct plot links to A Time to Kill, it is certainly a group of characters well worth revisiting after the incredible success of the previous novel which tells of the trial of Carl Lee Hailey who kills the two white rapists of his daughter.

This time, there is a mystery to be solved as to why a white businessman who was not much liked by anyone, would leave millions of dollars to his black housekeeper, cutting out his entire family, in a holographic will written a day before he hangs himself.

The fight over the will brings plenty of interest - it is far too common a scenario, the disputing of wills, and we are all drawn watch to avidly the nasty seediness of greedy families. But we know Grisham is exploring some other aspect of black/white relationships in the deep south and as usual, it is a race against time to discover it.

It may not be his very best, but it is certainly in the vicinity of his usual high standard with just enough character development and pacey unpacking of fascinating legal processes to force me to read it in just a couple of days.

I will even admit to shedding a tear, in a side-story to the main events of the plot. Perhaps it was because I was reading at 4am, afflicted with insomnia, and so more prone to emotion, but Grisham, showing the influence of his Christian faith, writes of some average, southern Americans, displaying a powerful form of forgiveness, and it did my heart good to read it.

If you love John Grisham, you will enjoy Sycamore Row and if you have never tried him, well, you probably will enjoy the ride. He's not one of the world's best selling authors for nothing.

We hope you enjoyed Cread's book review of Sycamore Row

Comments

  1. Mirza Ghalib Shayari14 January 2014 at 17:07

    to tell the truth, i bought this book for my mom and i havent read it. but she has, and she enjoyed it a lot found it very gripping and exciting. She is always on the look out for new stuff from John grisham, but she does nit like the Theodore Boone books. Other than those, she owns every single grisham there is.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book review: The life to come by Michelle de Krester

Image
One of the characters I most enjoyed in Michelle de Krester's The life to come is Sydney's inner west. I arrived in Newtown on a yellowy January morning in the early 1980s and lived above King St near the start of Erskinville Rd for six months before a succession of terrace houses across Newtown, Emmore and Macdonaldtown. Coming from the country to study 'Communications' I could easily have been minor character fodder for the author, momentarily shuffling by in ill-fitting jeans alongside the ubiquitous Pippa and George (that is, they are the only characters appearing in all five sections of what is an artfully decentralised narrative). I might not have done too well descriptively from de Krester's pen. She finds a way to poke holes in all of her characters, perhaps with the exception of expat Christabel who is the most downtrodden of characters, but not by the author, who otherwise sustains a mildly scornful, disapproving or comedic tone. For example, Geo
Read more + comment »

Book review: The Nowhere Child by Christian White

Image
Little Sammy Went is gone, and while The Nowhere Child tells us where fairly quickly - who, how, why and at what cost takes the rest of this fast-paced book to uncover. I use the cliche 'fast-paced' on purpose because like most genre books, except for the exceptional few, the 'fast-pace' does rely on cliches to a fair degree. Which is not to say The Nowhere Child is a poor novel. Rather it is a clever book, with more than enough periods of real tension and surprise to keep the reader turning pages (or flicking them as the case may be). Clever because it embeds just enough themes that are deemed praiseworthy and admirable in the subjective group-think world that is publishing. (That is not a criticism of the book or publishing, just a reality in these days of thought-fear.) Of course there is the obligatory references to reading and authors - we must worship at the the book altar of course. Being set in both Australia and the US may explain why at times Matth
Read more + comment »

Book review: The Choke by Sophie Laguna

Image
The Choke tells the story of a young girl raised by her war-ravaged grandfather in a beat-up house near the fictional Victorian town of Nullabri on the banks of the Murray River. Nullabri may well be located across the water from fictional Bellington and Riversend from Chris Hammer's Scrubland as we find ourselves in another rendition of dystopian rural Australia where the river (or lack of) is a silent presence. Author Sophie Laguna has again given her child heroine Justine and the other young characters a warmth and vulnerability so easily observable in children and it is part of the growing tension of the book as to how this will be ripped apart by the mostly dysfunctional adults in their lives. Or by the eroding process of simply growing up in poverty and ignorance. There is something dangerously criminal about Justine's father who is mostly absent yet longed for by Justine and her step-brothers. The depiction of his return, his dismantling of his sons' fragile
Read more + comment »