Playing For Pizza is a quick and easy read. It is not, in my experience, a typical Grisham novel. The main character is Rick, an NFL quarterback who gets continually traded, until he makes a huge mistake and no team will buy his contract. He ends up being the American quarterback on an Italian football team. He is a man who seems to have no real purpose in life. He wanders from team to team and woman to woman. He is the quintessential man who never grows up.

In my humble opinion, the story had no depth or intensity. Grisham may have written it that way as a statement of the way many people live their lives; making no real conscious decisions, they simply float from one day/place to the next. If that was not the case, I don't know why he wrote it.

I did enjoy the Italians. They were hearty happy folk who enjoyed what I consider to be the good things in life. Family and friends were their top priorities and they were doing something they loved because they loved it, not for money. Rick was a stark contrast to them. I will also say that the Italian dinner scenes in the book were fabulous! I never put it down that I didn't want to go and eat some excellent lasagna or ravioli!

Overall, it was not a book I would have picked up to read on my own. It does have its redeeming qualities but overall I was disappointed.

This is an excellent book. It revolves around the War years when the Japanese people were put into \'relocation camps\" by the US government. The stories weaves several perspectives through various view points. \"White Americans\", Chinese Americans, Black Americans , and Japanese Americans. The author intertwined each perspective to create a very real story of life during that era.