The Rooster Bar

Let me start by saying I’m a big fan of John Grisham. He caught me with “The Firm” and I’ve appreciated his novels and movie adaptions ever since. His stories have an authentic feel due to his background and he writes taut and compelling action. Let me continue by saying this was my least favorite Grisham book so far. It’s good subject matter which I appreciated. It covers the trap of high-end college degrees such as law schools, where lower-middle class kids build gigantic student loan debts at sub-par law schools only to find their chance of passing the bar and landing a decent paying gig at a law firm are very long odds. It also some what timely hits on the challenges that immigrates find themselves trapped in. It mostly show more follows a very successful formula that Grisham has often explored – unfairly treated underdogs overcoming great odds to topple evil men and corporations.

However, I struggled with this one. Two of the three underdogs, weren’t quite the underdogs I was used to, walking very shaky moral ground throughout the story. They also make very bad decisions. Grisham spends significant effort (the first hundred pages at least), building up the case for their decisions and desperate actions. Most of the rest of the novel, the protagonist spent their time digging themselves a deeper and deeper hole. While this builds plenty of tension, I struggled to fully root for them and felt more angst than enjoyment. I won’t spoil the ending, which Grisham does well to leave in the balance until the very end, but it was slightly satisfying. However, it wasn’t the same underdog story where I was able to cheer like a crazed Leichester City F.C. supporter in 2016, which I have done in many of his other books. I spent more time questioning their decisions and wondering if they should pay a price or not. Maybe that’s what Grisham wanted, to mix it up a bit, and make the reader more uncomfortable.

A lesser effort from a master storyteller, which explores some relatively important themes with strong tension, but fails to build the same rabid underdog enthusiasm, that his best previous works have delivered. show less

There are some good things in the "The Rooster Bar", enough of them that I read the book right to the end in the hope that it would be worth my time. It wasn't.

"The Rooster Bar" starts well. John Grisham quickly got me immersed in the pressure cooker lives of four for-profit Law School students, groaning under a mountain of debt and with little prospect of getting a job that would enable them to pay it back. He used the instability and obsession of the most charismatic of the four to lay-out the "Great Law School Scam" without making it feel like a clumsy infodump and then added a trauma to hook my emotions and make me care.

I relaxed and waited for some kind of clever and cathartic revenge to be extracted in a sort of "The Firm 2.O" show more way.

Grisham kept my attention and my emotional involvement by adding in a plot about how ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) the Storm Troopers of Homeland Security works.

This felt real and got the point across without sounding preachy. The shame of failing to treat people with dignity was made clear.

After that... well, the whole thing fell apart but slowly enough that I never quite gave up hope.

My main problem was that I didn't like and couldn't bring myself to care about the two emotionally distant, testosterone-driven, arrogant and amoral white boys who were positioned as the heroes of the piece.

Their reaction to having let their greed ensnare them in a potentially life-ruining scam was to scam everyone else. They commit crime after crime to make money, sustained by a sort of frat-boy belief that guys like them will never suffer the consequences of their actions. They were called Todd and Mark and I couldn't really tell them apart except that one (I can't remember which) was more willing to help a friend in trouble.

It seems that I was supposed to be cheering for these two would-be alpha male lawyers to out-smart the authorities, get revenge on the bad guys and ride off into a Tequilla-sustained sunset. Personally, I'd have been happy to see them both take their punishment.

Todd and Mark are the moral vacuum at the heart of this book. They're clever, resourceful, hard-working, brave but ruthless and willing to break any law to get their own way.

I could have lived with the moral vacuum if the book had ended with a great reveal or a clever, Mission Impossible slick finish but It didn't. Instead, it slid gently to a gentle stop as it ran out of momentum and I ran out of sympathy. show less

What I liked best about this book was how anxious I was at the end to see how things turned out for Mark, Todd and Zola. The suspense was great which is not something I've experienced before in a Grisham book. I love it when the author makes you cheer for the lawbreakers!

THE ROOSTER BAR by John Grisham
Should you cheer for deliberate, continuing law breakers? I sure did in John Grisham’s latest legal thriller. A bunch of disgruntled, under educated, over loaned law students attempt to wreak havoc on the dishonest, underhanded, money grubbing multi-billionaire who is behind their failing law school. The characters are unique and likeable. Although I didn’t follow some of the permutations of finance, it was easy to follow the plot. The indictment of our legal system and the sympathy with those innocent, and not so innocent, but usually poor, persons caught in the maelstrom of street lawyers and too busy public defenders is clear.
Another well written, legal outing by a master of the genre.
5 of 5 stars

This book is not up to the standards I associate with John Grisham. In fact, passages are so badly written that I suspect the work was produced by a ghost writer. The plot takes origin from an article that appeared in The Atlantic on the great "law school scam." (The focus is on a for-profit law school that takes on poor quality-students whose tuition is paid via government - sponsored loans. Unable to pass the bar exam, the students are saddled with life-long debt to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars).

In The Rooster Bar, three students see through the scam of which they are victims, and drop out of law school in their final semester. They impersonate attorneys and hang around the courthouse and hospital emergency rooms, in show more order to pick up small fees from drunk driver cases and injury cases. The Rooster Bar is where they work part-time in return for free rent. They hit the jackpot in joining a nationwide class action suit -- with a long list of fake clients (non-existent people). Somehow they get away with the scam -- stacking up over a thousand felonies that could have imprisoned them for decades -- and retire to Australia with their ill-gotten millions, leaving loan companies saddled with their debts.

I found the protagonists impossible to like -- they are unintelligent, unprincipled, and selfish, and generally lacking in any admirable human characteristics. What's more, their incompetence costs one of their supposed clients any chance of collecting in a wrongful death suit. That they get away with their scam and wind up as millionaires denies the reader even the catharsis of seeing them get what they deserve.

The Afterword contains a surprising feature -- Grisham notes that as usual, he has played fast and loose with how he presented the legal aspects. Perhaps I'm naïve, but I thought that as an attorney, Grisham would have accurately portrayed the law. So that's a disappointment that extends beyond this particular work, since I'd have expected more of an author who is actually trained in the law. show less

Fast-paced and engrossing, it's a very good holiday read. Grisham builds an engaging story with elements involving a suicide, financial and legal scam, unjust deportation and a great escape.

I have read virtually all of the author's output and particularly enjoyed his legal works. This book although it does feature lawyers has more to do with student fees and debt, a topic which has certainly been hot in Britain over the last few years and I've little doubt is likewise in the US.

The story opens with four friends, Mark, Todd, Gordy and Zola, enrolled at a not very reputable for- profit law school. It is the Christmas holidays, burdened with a mountain of debt (almost a million dollars in total between them) and facing a bleak job market they are about to return for the final semester. Each year, the number of students from their college who pass the bar exam (an exam that gives them the license to practice law) has gradually show more decreased and they soon begin to question quite why they believed and were convinced that they too could become lawyers.

Gordy, uncovers a scam that has duped thousands of unsuspecting students,like themselves, into borrowing large sums of money from the federal government with no possible hope of repaying it. A scam which depends on the federal government’s lax policies on student debt is unethical but is not a crime. As Gordy continues to dig deeper and unearth what had really gone on behind the scenes at their school he discovers that there are seven others functioning the same way. He also learns that a shady hedge fund billionaire not only owns the eight law schools but also a hefty chunk of the bank that arranged their student loans. Unfortunately his discoveries take a toll on his mental health and he takes his own life.

Racked with grief and guilt the three remaining friends decide that their prospects are so bleak that isn't worth finishing and graduating from law school before cramming for a bar exam that they are unlikely to pass. So thinking that no one at the school was likely to notice their non-attendance they simply drop out thus setting them off on a roller-coaster ride of loan collectors avoidance, hustling their way through the vast maze of the Washington DC legal system, involvement with fraudulent banks and class action lawsuits.

As with a lot of Grisham's books there is little in the way of character building, but there is just enough for the reader to feel the full depth of these friends' desperation and determination. The story is well crafted and as the action rattles along at a breakneck pace you cannot help but root for these unlikely underdogs and that hope that somehow, against the odds, they will triumph, that whilst they may be doing wrong they aren't bad kids, but instead are the real victims.

I have found myself a little underwhelmed by the last few Grisham books that I've read, felt that he was simply churning them out, but this is a reminder as to why I persevere with him. A rollicking fun tale. show less