Book Log 2006 #13: Ordinary Heroes by Scott Turow

This is a pretty significant departure from Turow's usual works of legal and crime fiction, and a pretty good one. There is still a patina of those usual topics - the narrator covers the courts for a Kindle County newspaper, while his father was an attorney - but the real meat of the book is the father's experiences late in World War II, and how they shaped the husband and father the narrator remembers.

Most of the book is in the form of a deposition - albeit a lengthy, highly detailed, and surprisingly literary one - written by the narrator's father prior to a court martial. The narrator knew nothing of this, or of much of his wartime service, and the deposition helps show why this man closed off that part of his life after the war ended.

Which means this book is as much about family, and the father-son relationship, as it is about the war (which is not surprising, as that's another regular theme for Turow). That the book and develop and extend this theme when one of the main characters is dead in its present, is pretty typical of how well Turow addresses such relationships. John Grisham couldn't have written this in eleventy billion years.