Amazon.co.uk:Customer reviews: Sooley: The Gripping Bestseller from John Grisham

Top positive review

A consummate storyteller.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 April 2021

I was a bit surprised reading this John Grisham book. I mean the man is a consummate storyteller and he doesn’t disappoint, but I felt this was a bit out if his usual format. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. The shocking twist in the middle really caught me off guard, having invested so much in the main character. Recommended.

12 people found this helpful

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Shane King

Grisham Should Stick To Courtroom Thrillers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 May 2021

Is John Grisham deliberately trying to alienate his international fans? It certainly looks that way. Eight years ago, he wrote the absolutely appalling baseball novel, 'Calico Joe', which, as an Englishman unfamiliar with the game, I struggled to follow, finishing the book with the opinion that I had just finished one of the worst books I have ever read.

Now, with 'Sooley' ,John Grisham appears to have written the second most tedious book he has ever produced. A totally incomprehensible novel,(to non-basketball fans, at least) taken up with detailed narrative about the basketball matches that the eponymous central character plays in.

As a long-time John Grisham fan, I found this book extremely disappointing, and not of the usual standard that we have come to expect from this author. Unusually for me, seventy-three pages in, I found the book so mind-numbingly boring, I threw it in the bin. Stick to courtroom thrillers in future, Mr Grisham!!!!!!!!!!

76 people found this helpful

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Shane King

Grisham Should Stick To Courtroom Thrillers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 May 2021

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76 people found this helpful

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Jim

Awful book. The first Grisham I couldn't finish.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 May 2021

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I pre-purchase Grisham as soon as Amazon lets me know that another novel is coming. Oh, I wish I hadn't wasted my money. This is the most disappointing book the man has ever written. Grisham, supposedly an international author, goes into endless, tedious detail of basketball - a sport that is significant in only three or four countries throughout the world. Chapter after chapter is devoted to move-by-move analysis of a game that most people couldn't care less about.

I buy Grisham for fantastic thrillers about people and the law. I'm guessing that he's either climbed onboard the woke bandwagon or decided that's where the money lies. If he wants to write this type of novel he could at least use a pseudonym - or make it very clear that he has abandoned the genre that made his name.

Unless you're a hard core basketball fan with a desire to understand the implications of a vicious ethnic conflict DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK.

51 people found this helpful

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Emarjee

Not what I expected

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 April 2021

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This is not a typical IF story - no courtroom, no crime,no investigation. It if very full of detail about the game of basketball. If you love basketball this will be of interest i imagine. I have no knowledge of the game, absolutely no interest in it, and understood not a word that was a major part of this book. I was interested in Sooley's story - but did not choose to read such a story and felt cheated that the headline advert of this did not make it clear that it is about basketball.

41 people found this helpful

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Robert James

Disappointed

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 May 2021

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Too much detail about basketball,as a Scotsman I didn’t know anything about the game really slow story,all in all not a good book for me.

32 people found this helpful

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anoninspain

Good but incomprehensible to non Americans

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 May 2021

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Like all Grisham books well written and a good story. However as Grisham himself states he is an armchair Basketball fan this means the many sections devoted to game play, player positions etc are not understood unless you are a Basketball fan.. In my opinion this book needs a glossary to explain all this. You need to be a US sports fan to understand all the jargon. Perhaps Mr Grisham forgot he has a worldwide audience?

17 people found this helpful

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Joadka

A consummate storyteller.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 29 April 2021

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12 people found this helpful

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Kieran Daly

Know Your Basketball or Be Lost

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 May 2021

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I have read and re-read in many cases all of John Grisham books and this is probably the poorest of them all. First we all accept that these are not meant to win any Booker prizes but he does draft a good story and his books always entertain.

This one does not really do that.

The issue really is with the basketball narratives which there are a lot of and are an important part of the story.

If you do not understand basketball a lot of this will be COMPLETELY unintelligible. I coached basketball and played for years and I found some of the basketball language tricky and at times a bit childish even. It seemed he gave the basketball story to a teenager to write. Some effort to dumb down the tactical talk would have made sense. How it got past an editor baffles me.

The story outside the basketball games is decent bar what I thought was a clumsy twist in the tale and yes I read it to the end but overall very very disappointing.

10 people found this helpful

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Donny Rock

A bomb! And not in the basketball sense!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 May 2021

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Master of the courtroom thriller pens a sports novel focussing on Basketball. The basketball story is about a teenager from South Sudan who 'makes it big' in the USA. The career of the young man is told glibly and predictably. The more important, to me, 'sub-plot' is the inhumanity in South Sudan and the squalor and poverty in the camps despite the efforts of Medecin sans Frontieres and other organisations. I feel this human disgrace is downplayed and could well do with a more prominent place in the book. I must admit to being somewhat bored by the dullness of the almost case history-like recitation of the scores achieved by the title character.

9 people found this helpful

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Of dreams, discoveries and devastations.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 December 2021

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Sooley is the thirty-sixth novel by that consummate master of storytelling, John Grisham. It is, however, a different kind of story to that normally expected of Grisham, and it may not please every one of his literary fans. The reason for this is that Sooley is not the normal type of story emanating from Grisham’s literary imagination, that is, it is not a story that focuses on the law, law breaking, and court procedures. Its range is more widespread.
Sooley, which is sub-titled “One man, One Hope, One chance to become a legend”, is located in the two different world; one world is the sport of basketball, the other is the world of the African refugee camp. Samuel Sooleyman is a young man from Lotta, a village in South Sudan. He is a promising basketball player from a poor family, who is chosen to play for his country in a basketball tournament to be held in the United States of America.
The early part of the novel follows his efforts to get into the team and its participation in the tournament. Samuel’s story is told against the poverty of his village, and the fact that there is warfare in South Sudan. This warfare has a huge impact on Samuel Sooleyman’s family. These two primary scenarios are set back-to-back in the initial stages of the novel.
The middle stages of the narrative focus on Samuel’s success at basketball whilst in the USA, and the reason he was given the nickname “Sooley”. To this stage of the novel, Grisham tells a straightforward narrative that is full of descriptions of, and events surrounding, games of basketball – always interspersed with accounts of how his dislocated family fares in a Ugandan refugee camp. The descriptions of the basketball encounters are often very technical and this may annoy some readers of the novel.
However, for this reviewer, who knows little of the technicalities of basketball, there is minimum impact on the enjoyment of reading the novel. The story-telling variations necessitated by the focus on the details of playing on a basketball court, is little different in its literary and imaginative impact to that experienced by reading of detailed accounts, descriptions of the law, and proceedings in a court of law that occur in many of John Grisham’s other novels. Indeed, this shows the variety of novelistic skills possessed by the author. His knowledge of basketball, as with law, seems quite profound – and it is instructive!
To reveal many of the details of the second half of the book would be to lessen its narrative drama and the impact of its human story. The fact needs to be stated, however, that it was increasingly difficult to put the book down, and this reviewer was eager to turn each page. As has become customary with Grisham’s writing style, the different aspects of the interwoven stories are not allowed to remain on the pages for any great amounts of time – each segment of each aspect of the story is as long, or as short, as it is required for story-telling and organisational purposes. The story unfolds methodically, with plenty of narrative colour, as well as understanding of the depths of human suffering and tragedy. The conclusion of the narrative comes all too soon.
As a novelist, John Grisham has received many accolades. With the publication of Sooley, Grisham has been called “a superb, instinctive story-teller”, “a master of plotting and pacing”, and, for this reviewer, perhaps the highest praise of all, in that his books are “smart, imaginative, and populated by complex, interesting people”.
There is no doubt that, in his thirty-sixth novel, John Grisham has been “willing to strike out in new directions”. This reviewer welcomes these new directions and warmly commends Sooley to the many Grisham aficionados, as well as to those who might consider an invitation to discover what this author offers in literary delights

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Subjects too narrow

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 May 2021

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I enjoy John Grisham books
But the conflict in South Sudan sad though that is and basket ball are very narrow topics of scant interest to me
So I only read less than half of it and do not feel tempted to return to it

4 people found this helpful

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