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A review by ncrabb
Ford County: Stories by John Grisham
3.0
I'm not a fan of short stories. I normally avoid them. But when I ran across a collection of seven stories by John Grisham, I figured I could break my rule just this once. I'm thrilled I did.
“Blood Drive” is the first story in the collection. A construction accident in Memphis injures a young Ford County, Mississippi man. The community comes together at his mother's home, and after much handwringing and indecision, a small group decides what the young man needs most is blood. They organize a three-man blood drive and send them off to Memphis to donate at the hospital. One of the three, Roger, is a chronic drunk. He insists that they pull over at the first convenience store they find, and he makes a bathroom stop and buys a sixpack of beer. As they drive, he finishes the cans, and he shares the unopened ones with the other two men. Naturally, with the first sixpack gone, Roger feels a need for a second one. accordingly, they stop at another establishment where he procures it. This is a great story, but you'll be frustrated and a little depressed at its outcome.
“Fetching Raymond” is the story of a wheelchair-using matriarch and her sons who traverse the state to visit one of their siblings on death row. The author magnificently wrote this. You feel all the tension of a death row inmate. You experience boundless hope and boundless despair in the same story. Regardless of your position on the death penalty, this is 1 you want to read and not skip.
“Fish Files” looks at a lawyer who suddenly comes into an unexpected amount of money. The guy has always been a small-town shyster. He has bilked clients out of a great deal of money over the years. To his amazement, the new owner of a company he sued years earlier wants to clean out its old backlog of unsettled cases. If you ever heard the lyrics to a 1985 song sung by country artist Tom T. Hall called “Down in the Florida Keys,” you have a fairly good idea how this story turns out. I've always loved the song, and I suspect most of us have fantasized about just walking away from it all some days and starting all over.
In “Casino,” a seemingly drab accountant gets sweet revenge and the last word on a sleazy developer who stole his wife.
“Michael’s Room” deals with the heartbreak of disability and a malpractice suit the family should have won but didn't. This is an example of how the legal profession does more harm than good.
If you read “Quiet Haven,” you’ll read about a nursing home worker who is amazing at gravitating to those seniors with assets. He has a nice system in place. First, he bilks the nursing homes where he goes to work, then he finds a way to squeeze money out of the old people for whom he cares.
In the final story, “Funny Boy,” a young man with AIDS comes home to Clanton where he encounters extreme prejudice on every side. This story will make you feel like it's the late 1980s all over again. It will tie your guts in knots, I promise. The young fellow can't even get a taxi to take him to the library because the driver is convinced the sick young man will leave his AIDS germs in the cab. For some of you who lived that experience directly, I suspect this will bring back some ugly memories. For those who lived that through a family member, I bet this story resonates with you as well. For the rest of us, there is the awful shame and sorrow that comes with associating an illness with unfair connections. This isn't all about despair though. The young man, in his dying days, strikes up a friendship with an aging black woman who cares for him at the end of his life. So, this is a story about friendship, hope, and love overcoming fear. It is an appropriate way to end the book.
I can't say that I found any of the stories in this collection to be weak. Perhaps one or two of them will stand out more vividly in my memory than others, but on balance, this is an evenhanded collection. It didn't feel like any of these would have been unpublishable throwaways that he included just to pad the space between the covers. They all have merit, and they all look at different pieces of the legal system and those who populate it. It's not only good fiction, but it's constructive and eye opening as well.
Incidentally, despite the stupid high-priced medicine, the arthritis siege meant I had to entirely dictate this review. If there are bizarre errors, places where whole words are replaced with numbers and similar things, I sincerely apologize. I've read through it carefully several times, but it's incredibly easy to miss the most glaring of errors. I'm hoping you get through it without much difficulty and that my clumsiness won't be a distraction or a deterrent for you from reading the book.
“Blood Drive” is the first story in the collection. A construction accident in Memphis injures a young Ford County, Mississippi man. The community comes together at his mother's home, and after much handwringing and indecision, a small group decides what the young man needs most is blood. They organize a three-man blood drive and send them off to Memphis to donate at the hospital. One of the three, Roger, is a chronic drunk. He insists that they pull over at the first convenience store they find, and he makes a bathroom stop and buys a sixpack of beer. As they drive, he finishes the cans, and he shares the unopened ones with the other two men. Naturally, with the first sixpack gone, Roger feels a need for a second one. accordingly, they stop at another establishment where he procures it. This is a great story, but you'll be frustrated and a little depressed at its outcome.
“Fetching Raymond” is the story of a wheelchair-using matriarch and her sons who traverse the state to visit one of their siblings on death row. The author magnificently wrote this. You feel all the tension of a death row inmate. You experience boundless hope and boundless despair in the same story. Regardless of your position on the death penalty, this is 1 you want to read and not skip.
“Fish Files” looks at a lawyer who suddenly comes into an unexpected amount of money. The guy has always been a small-town shyster. He has bilked clients out of a great deal of money over the years. To his amazement, the new owner of a company he sued years earlier wants to clean out its old backlog of unsettled cases. If you ever heard the lyrics to a 1985 song sung by country artist Tom T. Hall called “Down in the Florida Keys,” you have a fairly good idea how this story turns out. I've always loved the song, and I suspect most of us have fantasized about just walking away from it all some days and starting all over.
In “Casino,” a seemingly drab accountant gets sweet revenge and the last word on a sleazy developer who stole his wife.
“Michael’s Room” deals with the heartbreak of disability and a malpractice suit the family should have won but didn't. This is an example of how the legal profession does more harm than good.
If you read “Quiet Haven,” you’ll read about a nursing home worker who is amazing at gravitating to those seniors with assets. He has a nice system in place. First, he bilks the nursing homes where he goes to work, then he finds a way to squeeze money out of the old people for whom he cares.
In the final story, “Funny Boy,” a young man with AIDS comes home to Clanton where he encounters extreme prejudice on every side. This story will make you feel like it's the late 1980s all over again. It will tie your guts in knots, I promise. The young fellow can't even get a taxi to take him to the library because the driver is convinced the sick young man will leave his AIDS germs in the cab. For some of you who lived that experience directly, I suspect this will bring back some ugly memories. For those who lived that through a family member, I bet this story resonates with you as well. For the rest of us, there is the awful shame and sorrow that comes with associating an illness with unfair connections. This isn't all about despair though. The young man, in his dying days, strikes up a friendship with an aging black woman who cares for him at the end of his life. So, this is a story about friendship, hope, and love overcoming fear. It is an appropriate way to end the book.
I can't say that I found any of the stories in this collection to be weak. Perhaps one or two of them will stand out more vividly in my memory than others, but on balance, this is an evenhanded collection. It didn't feel like any of these would have been unpublishable throwaways that he included just to pad the space between the covers. They all have merit, and they all look at different pieces of the legal system and those who populate it. It's not only good fiction, but it's constructive and eye opening as well.
Incidentally, despite the stupid high-priced medicine, the arthritis siege meant I had to entirely dictate this review. If there are bizarre errors, places where whole words are replaced with numbers and similar things, I sincerely apologize. I've read through it carefully several times, but it's incredibly easy to miss the most glaring of errors. I'm hoping you get through it without much difficulty and that my clumsiness won't be a distraction or a deterrent for you from reading the book.