After 20+ years, there are lots of opinions about whether you need to be a football fan to appreciate this book. Since I AM a football fan, I can only give my biased answer of “no.” Certainly you can appreciate some of the jargon, but the melancholy longing for high school — the good and the bad — is not something that is unique to athletes. Who hasn’t looked back on high school and thought that it seemed like yesterday? Anyone have any regrets about dumb crap you said or did back then? Anyone wish you could turn back the clock or maybe slow down time? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then there might be something in this book for you.

As for the football and Coach Eddie Rake, I have no doubt that there were coaches like him, especially in Texas. I also am not sure that sort of coaching could ever happen again. High school players are signing multi-million dollar deals to play for college programs. In no way, shape, or form are they — or their parents — going to put up with physical or mental abuse just for the glory of wearing Spartan green or whatever jersey you can name. Eddie Rake, Woody Hayes, Bobby Knight. Their time is in the past. But the nostalgic feelings for our youth? I doubt that will ever go out of style. (Sidebar: John Grisham narrates the audiobook. I recommend it. He has the right tone, pacing, and drawl because, well, he wrote it!)

This was a good book I enjoyed the theme of sports and commodore throughout the town. This is a very serious football town and throughout the book many past histories of this town's football the field, the coaches and the players. The book turns into an emotional novel about a legendary coach in the town who brought them to many championships. I enjoyed this book because of the football setting in the town the players and coaches are celebrities in the town and everyone from the town even if they dont have kids on the team or are not avid football fans still show out to the games

This was another great red by Mr. Grisham. Christian. The story kept me hooked and it was a great cook read cook read well getting things done in the kitchen at work. It's done in the kitchen at work. Definitely would highly recommend this book if you'd like just reading about cash if you like just reading about casual life and sports.

Not your typical Grisham book, and that’s not a bad thing. If one has no interest in or understanding of football, some of this story may be a bit dry, but try to get past that and focus on the meat of this story.

Una veta diferente de Grisham que desconocía. No me ha enganchado lo suficiente porque sinceramente de fútbol americano no entiendo mucho y jamás este deporte podría tocarme fibra sensible alguna. De todos modos, he aprendido algunas cosas y no ha sido tan pesado. Se agradece la brevedad para los que no nos moviliza este deporte.

Nothing thrilling. Good small town story.

Let me start by saying I judge books by their covers. I don't spend the time to read the summary, I look at them and say yes or no. I said yes to Bleachers. I gave it a 3 star...

The writing is good, it flowed and kept me engaged enough to finish. I did not realize it was a book about football. I hate football, I don't understand it and I don't care about it or its players. I normally would have just moved on, but I liked the writing. I finished it, but did skim a few paragraphs here and there. I have no interest to ever read it again.

If you're into football or sports in general, it's worth a read.

Somewhere out there is someone who heard that John Grisham was a great author, chose this as their first book of Grisham's to read, and remains confused about the hype.

This book has all the mental complexity of "See Spot Run." If anyone else submitted this for publication, it would have been turned down by any reputable publisher. a) The story lacks a plot of any sort. b) When the writer turned lazy, he turns a conversation between players almost into bullet points. ie, Neely: Hello. Paul: What a game. Silo: We were great. Neely: Yes we were. And so on. Then before long, back to typical prose, ie, Neely saw his old friend Paul and said, "Hello." c) The only real "mystery" involved is highly predictable and can be seen from early in the novel.

A number of inconsistencies involve he main character, Neely Crenshaw:
1) Crenshaw hates Coach Rakes but returns to be in town when Rakes passes away. Not to see Rakes, just to be in town. A town where has no ties. No friends that he's called in advance. And then to attend the funeral of a man he has hated.
2) Crenshaw's only tie to the town was his old teammate Paul Curry. The book says that he isn't close to Paul, but he still phones him 3-4 times per year. Well, if I talked to someone long distance on the phone that often, I'd know an awful lot about the person. And yet, Crenshaw had to ask how many kids Paul had.
3) Crenshaw doesn't want to relive his high school glory days as the All-American star quarterback. He avoids talking to people about it, but shows up unannounced at the old stadium on consecutive nights. He listens to an old audio-broadcast of one of their championship games. He recites the plays to his teammates as if the game happened yesterday.
4) Despite the aforementioned hatred of Coach Rakes and the promise to never return, Crenshaw sits front and centre at the funeral.
5) This may not be an "inconsistency" in writing so much, but it is truly unbelievable that after having broken up with a girl more than half his lifetime ago, he feels the need to profess an "I love you" to a girl he hasn't spoken to since he was sixteen years old.

200 pages, large font, small words, and I feel insulted for shelling out almost seven dollars for this crap.

Bleachers by John Grisham

This book failed to grab me, possibly as I don’t understand American football. However it was still well written in typical John Grisham style, with authentic characters and descriptive scenes. Not my bag, but ok.

“Bleachers” is a very good and inspiriting story. It made me think what my life will be like in the future when I’m done playing football. I could relate to it in many ways and some of the things John Grisham wrote about in “Bleachers” i have actually seen or heard about in my life time. "Bleachers" by John Grisham is about the legendary Messina Spartans football team and Coach Rake's team coming back to their home stadium and saying there last good-byes to Eddie Rake. Eddie Rake was the meanest and hardest coach throughout Spartan history but is the man who caused the Messina Spartans to be the best football team in history. While Coach Rake was slowly dying the boys got together in the bleachers and would talk about all the old games and memories they remembered and what they went through. Some memories were good and others were bad, but by the end of the night they would end up realizing what a great man and coach Eddie Rake was. He led them to many victories and state Championships and got them prepared for their future life. During the funeral, High school all-American Neely Crenshaw was probably the best quarter back to Rake and Crenshaw realized a lot once he heard some words from his old Coach. Neely Crenshaw is now a man who is all grown up and must finally forgive his coach and himself with the incidents they had in life before he can get his life back on track.

I’ve never read a John Grisham novel before, but I left my Springsteen biography in my apartment when I went home and got bored so I borrowed my dad’s tablet and got this from my library app because. Well, it was supposed to be about football and I can never say no to football.

And I suppose it was fine for that purpose - a random book you read because you don’t really have anything better to do. It was mildly entertaining, especially in the beginning, and I kept reading until the end so I guess that works in its favour?

John Grisham usually writes crime/thriller stuff as far as I know, and this really wasn’t as engaging as I thought it would be considering that. There wasn’t really anything super exciting about the plot - the “secret” about the coach is out fairly early if you pay attention, there’s no mystery to speak of, no questions being asked. The characters aren’t particularly interesting or sympathetic either, which might have worked as a narrative choice to show that these big football stars all turn out to be regular guys, but honestly since nothing exciting really happened it was mostly just boring without anyone to root for.

I’m really, really easy to sell on books about sports and I was still bored almost all the way through. As soon as you figure out which direction it’s going in, and that does not take very long, there’s no real reason to keep reading (except maybe to be proven wrong, but that’s not the case here). The prose is unspectacular and bland as well. There’s like one memorable quote in the whole thing. At least it’s not actively bad, though. Small victories.

It’s also pretty short; I think if it had been a lot longer I wouldn’t have made it to the end. Gotta give it to John Grisham though: he sure knows how to write a good football scene. I’m willing to accept that he’s just better at his regular crime novels. Maybe I’m gonna try one of those next time and hope for more than 2 stars awarded for being mostly boring and not hate-worthy.