“Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer”, by John Grisham

Grisham, John. Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer. New York: Dutton Children’s, 2010. Print.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually read a Grisham novel before, but I guess I don’t have to apologize for that.  This one caught my eye simply because I didn’t know he’d written any YA books, and I guess this is his first.  Like the recent Nickerson book, I started it at bedtime and ended up finishing the same night.  I found it quite enjoyable and reasonably realistic – Grisham resists the temptation to have his kid hero be in dire peril and solve a mystery that the adults around him can’t.  It was perhaps a bit pedantic here and there, but it didn’t detract from the story; and as a pedant myself, I appreciated the way he has the family watching Perry Mason, with the mother irritatedly saying “It doesn’t happen that way in real life!”.

Another good side of this is that LibraryThing recommends 10 other books by authors I’ve mostly never heard of, so there’s a whole genre out there I’ve been missing so far and can catch up on!