I really did not like this book. Loved the movie of The Firm and thought I’d give this a shot as I was in a reading slump and had never read John Grisham. I assumed it would be similar to other popular writers like Michael Crichton. Plot driven, expertise turned acceptable prose. Now, I love a great sentence and savor great writing. But I can also enjoy Dan Brown while also preferring Didion. The Exchange was just so terribly written and tough to hear my inner voice saying these sentences that I think I found my limit in what constitutes non-enjoyable reading. So. Many. Tropes. Gender stereotypes, and generally treating the audience as dumb. If you used the word souk in a paragraph set in Morocco, using an expository sentence to explain what a souk is explicitly just… something.
Curious if others had a similar experience with this book, if this is representative of Grisham’s other works, and if so, what the heck made this author so commercially successful. Again, I don’t consider myself a book snob but maybe I found my snobbery red line.
by wanderluster