Review by oxfordcommas91 - The Exchange

oxfordcommas91 's review for:

The Exchange by John Grisham

2.0

adventurous challenging mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Oof. It takes a lot for me to give a book such a low rating. Coming directly off my first ever read of The Firm, I was so excited to immediately dive into the sequel to know what ever happened to Mitch and Abby after their harrowing ordeal. I was expecting the same sort of fast paced, pulse pounding, danger around every turn and having to outsmart the bad guys as the first book had, but wow was this a sore disappointment.

I have no idea what happened to Grisham’s writing in the last 35ish years, but whatever it was wasn’t good, unfortunately.

First, it felt so unrealistic and naive to me that at the end of book one, Mitch and Abby are

running for their lives away from the biggest organized crime family in the country and by the time this book picks up, they are living public lives in NYC with Mitch literally a named partner at the biggest firm in the world

. Yeah, keeping it real low key, guys. Entirely believable that

after having locked up the whole firm and most of this mafia family for a decade or more, that everyone just decided to leave Mitch and his wife alone to live their perfect lives with perfect twin boys and a perfect apartment in Manhattan.

Mitch spent the whole first book reiterating to the

FBI and the reader that he’d never be able to come out of hiding for his entire life if he did what he promised to do. I don’t know how we get from “we won’t be safe even in witness protection” to living their real identities in one of the biggest American cities in less than a decade

.

Barring all of those massive plot holes (which were sorta impossible to get over for me, but I digress), the story was just… not good. It felt like an underdeveloped first draft - I couldn’t find it in myself to care about the characters because Grisham gave you no reason to, and the “action” in this book amounted to

meetings, a lot of long flights to the same 4 places, back channel negotiations with important people who might know terrorists, and vaguely threatening phone calls to some of our “main characters”

. I think that this book was the result of Grisham watching too many episodes of 24 after having a big glass of scotch and convincing himself that he could successfully branch out from legal thrillers to international terrorism and kidnapping. This resulted in the world’s most boring version of the movie Taken (but I hate to even invoke this film by name here. If you liked this movie, you will NOT like this book).

Our characters were all remarkably calm - like freakishly so - as if they’d all been parts of international terrorism plots before. They muddled through the plot with the emotions of a robot. No discussion of the grief, survivors guilt, fear, panic, and sadness they’d all be feeling at one point or another. Just hop on another plane to another meeting. No sleeping or eating and constantly negotiating with terrorists without showing any ounce of emotion is truly a feat.

Another knock to this one - there are definitely instances of covert Islamophobia and cultural disrespect towards Muslims in this book. At one point Grisham explains how the Libyan security teams all had “too difficult/complex” last names to even remember. There were odd cultural references made and it definitely portrays the Middle East, as a region, as a bad place full of extremists and terrorists. He also references “transvestite dancers.” This book was published in 2023. Everyone should know better by now.

I blew through it quickly, hoping for some sort of satisfying and fast paced resolution. Somehow the end of the book - during the biggest reveals - was the most boring. How was there not one twist? I kept waiting for some sort of connection to be made to Mitch and Abby - their lives and their past - but it seems like they were just randomly involved. Like what? What compelled Grisham to write this book and what publisher & editor felt proud to send this out the door?

Content Warnings