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Sebastian Speier seabass — I love, love, love stories about Japanese culture, especially something like this with such a wonderful blend of contemporary and traditional customs/folklore/society. There was clearly a lot of research that went into creating this that rewarded those with a good understanding of Japanese history and terminology, and explained complex concepts without making the story drag too much. The main characters felt authentic and three-dimensional, although the supporting characters would have been better if they had been fewer in number and greater in depth. However, I hate, hate, hate uber angst, and having read "Warriors and Healers" I might have been warned that H.J. Brues has no problems putting characters through hell. I can understand in retrospect why the reader didn't get more clues about the motivation of the kidnapper; having the violence be unexplained and almost randomly psychotic made the victim's suffering even keener. But after a point it got (for me) to be almost "you think THAT was bad? Wait till you see THIS". I am truly grateful for the reviewers who gave me a heads up this was coming; I don't think I could have finished it otherwise. And the way the author wove the themes of honor, tradition, love and revenge together was worth figuring out...but I wasn't able to really enjoy that process because I was so horrified by the details. In a way it's a tribute to Brues' skill as a writer that I was so invested in the story and characters that I was so repelled by the angst. It kind of makes me crazy that a story that makes me reach for the brain bleach is so compelling. I will probably read this again in the future, so that I can look for the clues and enjoy the complexity of the story, knowing how everything is resolved at the end.

Dragoslav Andjelkovic dacyboy — It's weird, but during this book I suffered through various feelings of like and dislike. When I started reading it, I actually liked it quite a lot, but then it sort of seemed to drag on. The inside flap of The Last Juror states that it's about how Danny Padgitt murdered a woman and while he was on the stand, threatened to harm the jury if they convicted him. But really only about the first 50 pages and the last 100 pages actually dealt with the trial and Padgitt's threat. My main gripe with this is that it deviated so much from what it seemed the actual book was about. When I started reading this, I thought that it would be suspenseful with this sort of agonizing tension starting from the trial to Danny Padgitt's threat to the picking of the jurors one by one, but it wasn't like that. Another thing that annoyed me was the actual ending. It seemed very anticlimatic and it seemed like it came out of left field. I found myself thinking "That's very, very implausible" and also "How would no one know?." The ending was also very abrupt. I guess some of the book was interesting and I did care about some of the characters. It was also nice how he had characters from A Time To Kill appear briefly in The Last Juror. Although, I really didn't think Lucien Wilbanks was such a bastard in A Time to Kill, but I thoroughly disliked him in this one. I've only read one other Grisham book and that was A Time To Kill. That one was fabulous. This one...not so much. I'm still planning on picking up some of his other books (especially since I own like six others) and am hoping the brilliance that was behind A Time to Kill, shines brighter on one of the others.

Mateusz Kopacz kopiko90 — So, I'm a big fan of Wally Lamb's book, "I Know This Much is True", and when I read somewhere that he volunteered twice a month to teach writing at a women's prison in Connecticut and a book of their essays had been published, I was definitely curious. And a little jealous. I would LOVE to be given an opportunity to practice writing with the help of an author such as Lamb! Not that I'm willing to get myself locked up to do so, but you get the drift. :) Anyway, the result of his work with these women is a pretty powerful book. None of the essays speak in great detail about the crimes that landed them in jail, but instead offer a quick glimpse into the worlds that led up to their imprisonment whether it be a story from childhood, adolescence, or adulthood. It is clear these women use writing as a way to process things, people, and events in their lives that helped them become who they are. And I use the word "helped" with tongue-in-cheek because what these women are processing are mostly traumatic circumstances such as poverty, physical and/or sexual abuse, neglect, etc. What I think I like most about the book as a whole is that not one single author used the terrible things they'd been through to make excuses for or justify their reasons for being in jail. I mean, wow. That, to me, speaks volumes about a person's ability to be introspective enough to gain peace with their lives. All in all, I'd recommend this book not just for the writing itself (and it's really good writing, by the way), but for the content and lessons each of the essays have for us to learn about worlds some of us are lucky enough never to experience, and about jail itself. In his introduction Wally Lamb tells a story about an accquaintance who upon hearing of his volunteer work at the prison made her narrow-mindedness and lack of compassion for the inmates very well known and he said it is for her that he put the book together. If anyone can read this book and still write any of these women off as useless in this world, that reader needs his/her heart checked to make sure it's still actually beating.

Simon Larsen _imon_arsen — This book did not go the way that I expected. In fact, it ended the way I thought it would begin. The only reason I read it through to the end was in the hopes that it would get to that place.