The best thing I can say about this book is that it's a great education in U.S. legal procedure, and if that was John Grisham's aim, he hit a bullseye. The worst thing I can say is that I'll bet it's been a long time since Grisham actually talked to a real kid, because Theo Boone doesn't talk anything like my thirteen-year old or his friends. He's a bit of a goody-two-shoes, the kind of kid who looks at school with a real rah-rah spirit of competition, and loves and respects every adult he meets.

The plot is pretty simple: Theo Boone, whose parents are both lawyers, and who spends most of his free time hanging around courtrooms and law offices, is on a first-name basis with important judges and lawyers, and knows the law really, really well, gets unwittingly entangled with a murder trial when an illegal immigrant confides in him that he's seen something no one else has seen--something that will change the course of the whole trial.

Grisham tells us from the start that in real life, there are no courtroom dramas, no surprise witnesses who burst in at the last second...the law simply doesn't leave room for that, so neither does this story. Instead, the drama is forced to unfold rather predictably and anticlimactically...which may be true to real life, but doesn't make for great middle-school reading. This may be why courtrooms are not a real hot-spot among eighth graders. I'm just guessing.

Still, you can't argue that this book isn't an education, so I predict it'll be read in a lot of classrooms around the country, possibly even sparking a sequel or a series. And if it comes to that, it wouldn't be a bad thing: Theo's a likeable enough kid. But Grisham needs to dig a little deeper and come up with some of the stuff that makes his grown-up novels such page-turners. Turn up the suspense here, John: the kids are big enough to take it.