Bleachers by John Grisham

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Recommended: Personality can affect sports

Have you ever wondered why sport coaches have such a huge impact on their athletes? In Bleachers by John Grisham follows the main character, Neely, and all the situations that he encounters as his high school football coach, Coach Rake, is nearing death. This novel begins with Neely meeting his high school classmates after he injured his knee from a football game and disappeared from town for fifteen years. With the town proximity being rather small, almost everyone knew each other fairly well. The town had the same banker, Paul, a coffee shop that that each citizen frequents, and a football field named “The Field” that tens of thousands of citizens and fans visit every football season. Bleachers is a fairly well written novel because it contains possible events that may happen in modern reality such as the different series of events, the characters, and the conflict’s that are involved, but the novel is also semi-poorly written due to its flaws contained in its context.

First, Bleachers is well written in the New Criticism point of view because the characters in the book are believable. The character that plays an important role in this novel other than Neely would be Coach Rake. Coach Rake is involved in every possible situation that occurs upon the lives of his athletes. First of all, what makes Coach Rake a believable character, is that he has stayed at the same town and coached for the same school for many generations of football player’s. In addition, he tends to over exaggerate situations just as much as a normal human being would tend to do when their memory fails on them. For example, Rake had exaggerated that one of his fellow athletes had completely broke his ankle and still continued running across the footba...

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...n that allows the reader to realize. But Bleachers did not contain a universal truth. Therefore, Bleachers is also a poorly written novel.

In conclusion, Bleachers by John Grisham is a good book and a bad book at the same time because of the characters, the conflicts, and the events occurred in it plus a little bit of flaws in it. With this combination, Grisham had written a fairly good novel for a passing time reading at one sitting. A little bit too much of good is bad, and a little bit too good of it is even worse, but a little bit of both here and there creates the perfect blend.

Works Cited

Chen, Anna. Personal Interview. 01 May 2011.

D at Goodreads Inc. Online Book Review. 09 Oct. 2009 Web. 04 May 2011.

Kevin at Goodreads Inc. Online Book Review. 18 Jun. 2008. Web. 04 May 2011.

Grisham, John. Bleachers. New York. Bantam Dell. 2003. Print.

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