Reviews for Karen's County Fair

The average rating for Karen's County Fair based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-05-28 00:00:00 Fabio Silva “I'm alone and outgunned, scared and inexperienced, but I'm right.” Smooth, savvy, satisfying…I think this is my new favorite John Grisham novel. While not heavy on scholarly nuance, it has some depth and is crisp, right-hearted, expertly paced and reads like ice-cold lemonade on the porch in summertime.* *Please feel free to mentally substitute the simile ‘hot toddy curled up in front of a fire in winter’ if you prefer. While this page-turner is a very easy read, I wouldn’t call this light as Grisham does a good job infusing the narrative with a sense of importance and emotional attachment vis a vis the characters and the central plot. Grisham knows his subject and has a knack for dispensing highly digestible tales that quickly suck his readers into the middle of the story where they remain engaged until the end. I can think of worse ways to spend time than reading this author's work. PLOT SUMMARY: We meet Rudy Baylor when he has not yet finished his third year of Law School at Memphis State. We get a scratchy taste of the less than glamorous job market search for non-elite students as Rudy is smart, but middle of the pack. He’s an everyman and we can relate to him and the choices with which he is confronted. All students enter law school with a certain amount of idealism and desire to serve the public, but after three years of brutal competition we care for nothing but the right job with the right firm where we can make partner in seven years and earn big bucks. Through a series of missteps, bad luck and the realities of more lawyers than legal positions, Rudy finds himself working for J. Lyman “Bruiser” Stone, a shady, shark-like ambulance chaser who makes serious bank not-so-secretly owning most of the topless bars and nightclubs in Memphis. Tip of the cap to Grisham as “Bruiser” is a great character. Rudy gets teamed up with another wonderful, morally lenient character named Deck Shifflet. Deck has failed the bar six times and basically practices law without a license as a “paralawyer.” Together, we watch two very struggling guys trying to scratch out a living in the overcrowded, lawyer-eat-lawyer world of Memphis Law. There is a well done blooming romance between Rudy and an abused wife and some comic relief involving a nettlesome grandma out to re-write her will to cut off her ungrateful kin. However, the steak of this meal is a bad faith claim against an insurance company, Great Benefit. The whoreporation wrongfully denied coverage for a bone marrow transplant that would have save Donny Ray Black, a young man dying of Leukemia. We watch Rudy’s trial by fire as he is thrown in the deep end battling the evil insurance company and its massive team of $1000/hr litigators from the “Pole-in-the-Keester” mega law firm. THOUGHTS: The inner-workings of the courtroom and legal proceedings are handled lightly with sparse details and the concatenation of circumstances leading to the final verdict do not always rigorously following the realistic as the expense of entertainment. I didn’t have an issue with this because it kept the pacing brisk without bogging the story down in details that I think most readers would find tedious. The law is not an exciting place. However, Grisham, to his story-telling credit, creates excitement by populating his tale with a bevy of Southern-flavored characters that feel alive and genuine. I don’t think Grisham gets the credit he deserves for this as it a real gift. In this outing, we have: **The aforementioned “Bruiser” Stone and Deck Shifflet add much color to the proceedings. **Dot Black, the chain-smoking, embittered mother of Donny and her husband Buddy, a war veteran who is quietly drunk 24/7. This description may not make them sound likeable, but they are and they are devastated by their son’s illness. **Kelly Riker, the smart, beautiful 19 year-old trapped in a horrible marriage with her drunk, abusive husband who’s angry at the world because his dreams of being a pro athlete never materialized. **Judge Tyrone Kipler, the sympathetic judge who hates insurance companies and provides Rudy with valuable assistance and advice. These characters elevate the novel above the “just another bag of popcorn” legal thriller. I enjoyed myself reading this and will certainly pick up another Grisham book in the future. Before I wrap up, a quick word on the film/movie comparison. I had previously seen the movie adaptation of this novel and, like _A Time to Kill, I think the movie outshined its source. Very little had to be cut from the movie and Coppola did a great job of translating the tone of the story. Plus, with casting like Danny DeVito playing Deck Shifflet and Mickey Rourke as “Bruiser” Stone, the book had a pretty big uphill stroll to compete. Even years later, I remember the scene in the movie where Shifflet (DeVito) is pressuring an auto accident victim in traction and a lot of pain to sign up with him as his lawyer. When he finally gets the gut to relent (mostly to get rid of him) Shifflet walks away with an air punch saying, “Were gonna get you a bunch a money.” What a classic, classic lawyer line and I was happy to see that line was in the book as well. Anyway, the book is still very good and I did prefer the novel’s ending more than the movie. The endings are not significantly different, but Rudy Baylor’s outlook on the legal profession is put in much starker light in the book and I found that to be superior to the somewhat ambiguous handling of the film. In sum, if you’ve seen the movie, you are not missing much by not reading the book…not much except a well-written, entertaining story. You can decide. For me, the book was worth it and I enjoyed myself. 3.5 stars. Recommended.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-02-10 00:00:00 Randy Gaylord Why did I like this book so much? Because it showed the "other" side of lawyering - the side that isn't romanticized in Grisham's other novels. For once, there were no mobsters, no politicians with hidden agendas, no paranoid millionaires with money to burn, no fresh-out-of-college rookies who land in hot water because they accidentally stumbled upon a secret that their storied firms had been keeping for years. Rudy struggles from the outset. He's handed one opportunity after another, only to see it vanish in a twinkling. He's forced to find work at the bottom of the lawerly barrel, haunting hospitals in the hopes of finding cases to prosecute. That actually leads to a case that Rudy feels passionately about, and along with the storyline revolving around Kelly, makes up the majority of the book. I liked Rudy's idealism, his fear when having to go to court for the first time, his passion (and fear) for Kelly, and his doubts about his chosen line of work. It was a refreshing change from Grisham's other novels, and a great view of how the not-so-fortunate lawyer grads end up.