Review: The Reckoning

The Reckoning by John Grisham
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

417 pages. Four HUNDRED and seventeen pages. For a story that could have been told...in fact SHOULD have been told...in about 250, and that is being generous. I liken this novel to a trip I once took with my parents when I was a child. We drove from Pennsylvania to Florida to visit my grandparents. Along the way, my father thought he had some moral obligation to pay homage to every roadside attraction within 50 miles of our route. It was torture. So was this book. Every time Grisham seemed to return to the actual plot and gain momentum, another shiny object would grab his attention and send him racing in the opposite direction. It was maddening.

Fans of historic fiction will appreciate the prolonged and painfully detailed descriptions of the main character’s military experiences in WWII. Folks who thought they were buying the story billed in the summary will not. Seriously. Page after page after page about an American soldier captured by the Japanese, who then escapes and joins guerrilla fighters. Pages that added NOTHING in the way of furthering the plot.

I had other issues with this novel as well. The theme of segregation in the Deep South took such center stage that to miss the significance and not predict the outcome was virtually impossible. Additionally, the entire book alludes to a justifiable vengeance. In the end, it was, however, such an overreaction that every bit of sympathy, or sense of likability, I had built for the main character dissolved.

Clearly Grisham can write. He is an accomplished author with a huge and loyal fan base. Why he veered so far off the beaten path on this one is the true mystery. Two stars just because the writing was sound, but what a profound disappointment.

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