I finished reading John Grisham’s The Rooster Bar a week or so ago and honestly I don’t even know whether to give it one star or five or to throw it in to the corner or light it on fire. Whether to tell all of my friends to read it or to act like I never read it a day of my life.

Mark, Todd, and Zola came to law school to change the world, to make it a better place. But now, as third-year students, these close friends realize they have been duped. They all borrowed heavily to attend a third-tier, for-profit law school so mediocre that its graduates rarely pass the bar exam, let alone get good jobs. And when they learn that their school is one of a chain owned by a shady New York hedge-fund operator who also happens to own a bank specializing in student loans, the three know they have been caught up in The Great Law School Scam.

     But maybe there’s a way out. Maybe there’s a way to escape their crushing debt, expose the bank and the scam, and make a few bucks in the process. But to do so, they would first have to quit school. And leaving law school a few short months before graduation would be completely crazy, right?  Well, yes and no . . .
Pull up a stool, grab a cold one, and get ready to spend some time at The Rooster Bar.

That’s what Amazon had to say about this book and maybe that’s where I was lost I don’t love stools, at 34 they make my back hurt unless they have a good supportive back and arms and a cold one? A cold what? I think that beer whether it be cold or warm tastes like what pee smells like. *shrugs*

So probably at that last line I should’ve back away cued Randy Jackson, Not Micheal’s brother but this one:

and backed away from the book. But I didn’t because no matter what people say about John Grisham and his formulated writing method I actually enjoy quite a few of his novels. But this one…

The premise of the book is that Zola, Mark and Todd’s friend Gordy  realizes that their law school is a scam. The owner of the law school is a shister who is also behind the banks that supply the loans and some of the law firm mills which pretend to hire some of the students of the school so that they can have a propped up hire rate. After a tragic event th duping them and others into borrowing thousands of dollars for law school of which they won’t likely be able to pay much of it back sense neither of them is likely to either pass the bar or get a job.

So, what do they do? They quit law school, go into hiding in the same city as their law school, and began to practice law. Ya’ll these fools quit law school  the last damn semester to practice law??? In the same city as their law school friends who could graduate in a semester and easily see them running around practicing law all Willy Neely.

And that’s where I got stuck. Even though the author keeps having the characters address the stupidity of quitting law school in your final semester and illegally practicing law, none of the excuses that they give make any sense to anyone with a brain.

I did sort of enjoy the close calls that the three illegal attorneys get themselves in and out of throughout the novel and how Grisham weaves a multitude of current events and issues including the serious look at immigration but overall I left the book feeling underwhelmed and confused.

If you came here to figure out whether to read The Rooster Bar or not I’m sorry I can’t help you. After all of these words I still think the best thing to do with this book is to throw it into the corner.

  FYI: This is my face 95% of the story.