***** A secret guarded by sycamores
This novel by Grisham, despite being
set in the same place and having the same protagonist of “A Time to Kill,” is
not a real sequel to it, and can be read without knowing the story of the first
one, of which just a few mentions are made, only where necessary.
The theme is the
same, namely that of racism. This time Jack Brigance, a lawyer in Ford County,
a county in the southern United States where racism was still a major problem
thirty years ago (and I suppose it still is), is grappling with a holographic
will written by a wealthy white man that, before committing suicide (he was
dying of cancer), decides to disinherit his children and leave 90% of his
assets, 24 million dollars, to his black maid. This gives rise to a legal
battle to contest the will.
I loved, as always,
the characterization of the characters, both main and secondary ones, and the
reconstruction of the setting (Ford County
While the
disinherited children go to great lengths to accuse Lettie of captation (i.e.
of pushing the man to change his will, taking advantage of his condition, so
that he left everything to her), no one seems to wonder why he did it, what is
below his action.
And so, quietly, a
subplot unravels that leads to the truth, and that is related to the title.
This is a story of
something that could really have happened, strikingly realistic. It’s a story
that fascinates and leaves a smile at its epilogue.
I have only one
negative note to report. I love the way Grisham wants you to enter the setting,
even by telling all legal mechanisms and details about the characters. In this
book, though, I had the impression that the info-dump was really a bit
excessive or otherwise told in a little engaging way.
Sycamore Row on Amazon.
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