{"id":1664,"date":"2016-04-17T21:18:46","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T04:18:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=1664"},"modified":"2017-12-18T08:31:00","modified_gmt":"2017-12-18T16:31:00","slug":"review-defending-jacob","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2016\/04\/17\/review-defending-jacob\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Defending Jacob"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Defending<\/a>
\n Defending Jacob<\/a> by William Landay<\/a>
\n My rating: 2 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

I was in Maui. I was on vacation. I had already read three novels. They were, each of them, kind of heavy. Not hard to read, not over-long, just, you know. I wanted something a little more pulpy. So someone recommended Defending Jacob<\/em>. I\u2019ve read my fair-share of lawyer novels, and police procedurals, and family dramas. They\u2019re not my first go-to, but the person who recommended this one said \u201cI think about that book a lot.\u201d Compelling! So I gave it a try.<\/p>\n

And now that I\u2019m done, lawyer novels and police procedurals and family dramas are still not going to be my first go-to. I\u2019m not saying William Landay should have stuck to just the one theme, I\u2019m just saying that none of those themes made this novel any better.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the lawyer theme, the court-room stuff. Its all a little too realistic. Verisimilitude is supposed to be a good thing, right? Yes, if you need to be authentic\u2014but authentic does not equal interesting. Landay tries, by giving the judge an interesting character, for example, and providing background on some of the other courtroom personalities\u2014but none of it is put to any use. It\u2019s just a trial. We only get to see theatrics in the book\u2019s \u201cframe,\u201d where the narrator himself has been called to testify before a grand jury for a different case altogether. But it\u2019s not enough.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the police procedural, which kind of melts into the family drama sections. It gets started when the main character, an ADA, assigns himself to a homicide- but then he\u2019s taken off the case, and the procedural sort of fizzles. <\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the family drama, which is mainly driven by two contradictory ideas. The main character says, several times, that he knows<\/em> his son, knows<\/em> him well, knows<\/em> him well enough to know<\/em> that he is innocent. He also points out that his son is a teenager, and teenagers are mysterious, withdrawn, and live in a world all their own, impenetrable and unknowable<\/em> by adults.<\/p>\n

So I found myself shrugging through the entire read. I\u2019m fine with an unreliable narrator, but not an unreliable writer. And then there\u2019s two convenient moments of deus-ex-machina to, first, tie things up, and then, throw a curve ball so that the writer can tie things up again. In a slapdash, overly dramatic, sensationalistic (and let’s face it predictable) manner. The novel went from interesting to pedestrian to boring to cheesy.<\/p>\n

I have no idea why the person who recommended this to me \u201cthinks about it a lot.\u201d I\u2019ll have to ask.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Defending Jacob by William Landay My rating: 2 of 5 stars I was in Maui. I was on vacation. I had already read three novels. They were, each of them, kind of heavy. Not hard to read, not over-long, just, you know. I wanted something a little more pulpy. So someone recommended Defending Jacob. I\u2019ve … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: Defending Jacob”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-qQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1664"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1665,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664\/revisions\/1665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}