A review by deborahwithanoh
The Appeal by John Grisham

I'm not sure this book has any redeeming qualities. The most charitable interpretation of its message is as a cautionary tale/critical commentary on allowing the judicial branch to be decided by election, but if this was indeed the intended message, it couldn't have been delivered in a more boring or soulless way. The book has a real problem with "tell not show"; its attempts at creating "suspense" are pathetic; its characters function more so as plot devices, given little to no interiority and with their presence in the narrative dictated entirely by the needs of the plot, making them difficult to sympathize with or even keep track of. There's one tantalizing moment where a character seems about to experience something resembling an arc, as some kind of reward to the reader perhaps for slogging through the first 90% of the book, but then nothing happens. It's like somebody tried to execute a plot twist but didn't twist hard enough and the plot's inertia of predictability straightened it back out. Complete waste of time, but I'm not sure what I expected.