Nora Roberts, James Patterson and John Grisham are three authors I had absolutely no interest in. I cant stand when people write about the same thing. I feel as though all Romance, Mystery and Legal/Crime novels are pretty much all the same. I'm not interested in reading (insert name here) move to (insert town here), fall in love with town bad boy, thus escaping her past and realizing love can prevail in trying circumstances. I just read the following three books because I feel like I had to prove myself correct. An experiment if you will. I asked myself "Are Nora Roberts, James Patterson and John Grisham really as over-rated as I think they are, or should I perhaps give at least one of their books a chance?" Well, I gave them a chance, and the results are split.


Angels Fall
The only reason I picked up this book in the first place is because it won some award for Best Book of 2007. They were wrong, I'm saying it. Angels Fall features Reece Gilmore, a young woman who suffered a terrible emotional trauma in Boston as she was just embarking on a career as a chef at one of the hottest Boston restaurants. She ran away from Boston because of those memories and found herself Angel Fist, Wyoming. Her car breaks down and while she is waiting to get her vehicle, she sees a sign at a local diner seeking a cook. Reece is a woman who is living just one day at a time. One day, while hiking, Reece sees a murder committed but there is no physical evidence to support her and many people begin to believe that her trauma induced mind is giving mass to her terror. The only person who believe her is town badass Brody. Blah blah. Shes not crazy. They fall in love and live happily ever after. This book was slightly better than I thought it would be, but ultimately just forgettable. It would have moved up about ten notches if the ending played out so that...she actually was just fucking imagining a murder. Cmon.

C+


Playing For Pizza

This book is quite a departure from Grisham's usual legal thrillers. It's actually about football. And yea, I read the whole fucking thing. In Playing for Pizza, Rick Dockery is a third-string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns, and when he's forced to play during a playoff game, he blows it big time. His terrible performance causes the Browns to lose their chance at the Super Bowl and their enraged fans chase him out of town. The only football team interested in him now is the Parma Panthers. That's Parma, Italy. In Italy, Dockery finds teammates who play for the fun of it, and Italy's charms - its food, wine, and a certain female opera singer - draw him in. He even gets the chance to lead his new team to the Italian Super Bowl, if he can avoid disaster again.

Surprisingly, for a book about football, this was actually a really easy read. I enjoyed the fact that Grisham doesn't really stray from what football players are really like. Egotistical macho womanizers. Which is basically what the lead character is. But what's interesting is the story of him realizing Italy is actaully a really awesome place and sort falling in like with an Opera singer who is going through something very similar. Down and out football player meets shitty Opera singer and realize it's not all about just being good, its about loving what you do and being happy where you are. Aww. Footballs players have hearts too!

B


See How They Run
His wife is murdered at a party. His brother is killed at the Academy Awards. Now his former sweetheart is running for her life. Dr. David Strauss is soon obsessed with finding the explosive secret behind his family's murders--a secret born in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. His search takes him on a harrowing trek across Europe, and finally to the Moscow Olympics, where he will face the most terrifying surprise of his life. This book presented a new take on what I assumed mystery novels were. Patterson took a real issue and presented it with depth. Overall quite good.

B+