15) Recommended by someone else based on your review of previous book

[Lindsey]

Note: this challenge must be completed in order

15. Recommended by someone else based on your review of previous book: Share your review of your previous read with a friend, librarian, or on social media (check out The 52 Book Club’s Facebook Group!) Ask for a recommendation solely based on your thoughts of the previous book. Whether you loved it or hated it, recommendations should be based on that review alone, not your usual preferences.

Example: I really enjoyed my previous read, Desert Star, so someone recommended that I read Murder, Madness and Mayhem: Twenty-Five Tales of True Crime and Dark History by Mike Browne, a non-fiction read featuring twenty-five tales of true crime

[Devika]

Previous Prompt: Glitterland by Alexis Hall

This Prompt: Wolfsong by T.J. Klune

[Kelsey]

Previous Book: Dead Poet's Society by N.K. Kleinbaum
Current Book: The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
Who Recommended : A Work Friend

[DaNae]

I just finished Gray Mountain

I was hoping to get suggestions here for my next book. Here is my review:

Set against the turmoil of the 2008 financial crash, Samantha is furloughed from her job as a rising lawyer in a major New York firm. A condition of the possibility of getting her old position back, is to intern at a non-profit. She finds herself working in Legal Aid in a small Virginia mountain town. The town, Brady, depending on divided opinions, is either, run to ruin, or kept breathing, by the coal industry. Sam’s day-to-day and professional life is completely turned upside down.

I need to get a fair amount of details in this review as my next book in my Connections reading challenge is dependent on recommendation I get from this review. If you have a book you would recommend please put it in the comments.

What worked for me: I appreciated all the appalling facts that were shared about the coal industry. Both the rape of the land and the ravage to the workers. The sooner we cut our dependence the better. I really liked the small town setting, most particularly the Legal Aid team and office. I could watch a whole Apple or Netflix series on a legal aid office set in Appalachia. I mostly liked the characters, I felt like they rang true to a point. My one, possibly large caveat, is that Grisham is a little icky about writing from a woman’s POV. Not in a pervey way, just male wishful thinking on what a woman needs. Although I was unsatisfied that the stolen documents didn’t see the light of a courtroom in this book, I did love the Pentagon-Papers-like, cloak and dagger surrounding them.

What didn’t work so well: The romance, or whatever it was. I wish it didn’t even come up. One of the best things about the movie adaptation of The Pelican Brief was Denzel Washington refused to have a romance with the Julia Robertson character. Not every story needs a romance, and if an author needs to pander to that - they lose respect from me. See above about how gender portrayal played into my enjoyment. I wish more cases had made it into the courtroom, but I do get that he wanted to show it was an uphill battle to help poor people up against huge corporations. I really didn’t like how he hammered home how boring small towns are. I know he was mostly portraying Sam’s opinion, but it seemed to be shared by everyone else in the book, including residents of the town. It was very disappointing how he managed to equate being overweight with being either stupid or greedy or both.

This isn’t so much a criticism as a question: Is bugging offices and young lawyer’s homes, really as prevalent as it seems to be in EVERY Grisham book ever written?

Back in the nineties, my husband and I read every Grisham book as it came out, and then went on to watch the obligatory movie that soon followed. I will agree that he can tell a tale, mostly about underdog courtroom cases and/or thrilling cloak and dagger maneuvers. I haven’t thought about him in years and it was fun to revisit.

[Michele]

I really liked Killer Instinct, so the recommendation was I Hunt Killers by Barry Lyga. I've read that one, so I will read the last book in the trilogy, Blood of My Blood.

[Cathi]

I just Finished "A long Petal of the Sea" by Isabell Alende. Here is my Review and maybe someone has a good recommendation what i could read next :) I gave it 3.75 stars
enjoyed the writing style and was interested in the storyline. However sometimes this book felt more like a nonfiction and I had a hard time connecting to the characters. It took some time to get into the story. I enjoyed the second half way more than the first. On the other side I did not like the ending. It felt unfinished to me but that was probably the point. I would enjoy reading more historical Fiction similar to this. Has anyone any good recommendations?

[Sharan]

I didn't get the hype this book got - I almost didn't finish