After about fifty pages, I was tempted to give up on this book, but I stuck it out and really enjoyed it by the end. The basic story is that a new judge (who I guess was a character in an earlier Turow novel) finds herself with a murder-for-hire case in which the defendant was once a little neighbor boy who her boyfriend used to babysit, and all of the important figures from her 1969-1970 life come back to haunt her 1995 existence. The problem with the opening chapters is that Turow tries to write phonetically in a street gang dialect that sounds like "what a white lawyer thinks poor black people sound like." Even if his phrasings are accurate, he really shouldn't be the one to write them. When his narrative leaves the 1995 projects, it wanders to 1969 self-indulgent revolutionary Bay Area territory, though, and without any compelling motion to the plot in that thread, it read like the hypocritical Baby Boomer nostalgia that I have pushed against in adolescent rebellion since I was 22 or so.Once the 1995 trial begins, though, everything gets significantly better. The defense attorney plays some consistently dirty tricks that are wild enough to get my attention (and I'm a public defender) but restrained enough to be believable. The testimony unfolds with plenty of little surprises, and even the flashback chapters start to get ominous and intriguing. The story still suffers when Turow develops his emotionally distant main characters, but the plot itself is enough to keep me reading. Turow leaves things with an intentionally unsatisfying ending, I think with plenty of loose ends to connect to the way the revolutionary movements of the 1960s have left so many unsatisfying loose ends, and it really works for me, as do the eulogies that bring up the Abraham/Isaac story as a way to unite the various father/son stories that Turow had been weaving through his narrative.This is certainly not an essential read, probably not even for a Turow fan, but if you can find a cheap copy at a used book store, and you work in the criminal justice system, and you're kind of disappointed in the philosophical/spiritual state of the Baby Boomers since 1990, The Laws of Our Fathers is worth taking a couple of days to read.
Audiobooknarrated by James Snyder, Orlagh Cassisy, Dion Graham and Kevin T. CollinsThere are 21 discs. The story picks up at the 7th disc. The narrators were excellent but the writing was waaay to poetic for my taste. It was almost to the point of babble. It was like a soap opera in that I could skip a couple minutes ahead and still not lose sight of where the story was going. Hobie was a likable character up until the point that I stopped listening. Sonny was not believable as a woman. I mean I'm no expert but women do not act the way she did. She was scared to love based on some idiotic concept of which I could never grasp. Was it her upbringing? Her mother? Her philosophy? What was it. I have never bought into the notion that women sleep around with disregard for any feeling unless she is a prostitute. If a woman is with a guy sexually there is a reason. She can fool herself but deep down there is a reason. Sonny was painted as this woman who slept with and lived with and sexes with for no other reason than sensuality. That is a man's m.o. not a woman's. Not to say that she has to be in love with everyone that crosses her threshold but she is with him for reasons other than pleasure. I did not continue this book and I was close to the end. I have tolerances and this book crossed them . I have no idea of the ending. Kudos to the narrators portrayal of Hobie for the most part but he was too much of a jerk for me. The writer's "black" dialect lacked.
What do You think about The Laws Of Our Fathers (1997)?
I read the first fourty pages but this novel just didn't work for me.The hero was time warped by some type of deity just before the fall of a previous civilization. So we then spend too much time as this character meets a potential love interest. To add to it, the meeting is flat, prosaic and predictable. Lastly, the mentalities are little too contemporary to fit into the equivalent of a medieval, agrarian culture without a special explanation.My feeling is that this story would have prompted me to read more if there was more detail of the old civilization, other conflicts which could add some texture, less predictability andmore Historical details.
—StoryTellerShannon
Liked the beginning of this, the case is a good set up, wondering what really happened.... but THEN we go down a memory lane chapter or two (no, actually, the book is half flashbacks) which seems to be an excuse for Turow to revisit his days at UC Berkeley in the 60's... assuming he had some... and it's a little BOR-ing. I was there and it was more interesting than this. It's Ok, but could have been handled in a few pages... Now that I have nearly finished it, this is NOT a legal mystery or thriller. It's a character study of a female judge and people she knew in college. I liked the courtroom scenes a lot, but there are very few of them. I expect no more surprises at this point but will read the last 50-100 pages and see if my opinion changes.Ok, so, there were a couple of surprises in the end. But really I wish I'd just read a different book. I think I'm done with Scott Turow... even though he resembles my father in his youth.
—Francine
This book gave me such a dose of reality that I'm still shaking my head over!Not only does it give us, the us that has a real feel or lived through the 60s, a colored view of the world that rarely matches reality, but also the disappointed feelings of unresolved or unfinished business. The trial and view points of the participants was so different from what really happened that again, it makes you think and shake in disbelief. A testament to the unreal that makes you wonder if justice actually exists.
—Ada Iaboni
