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.

I picked up "Playing for Pizza" because it was about a Cleveland Brown who was having a rough go in his career. (Because really, aren't they all?) I don't know what I expected but the writing didn't draw me in. The book is not poorly written it just didn't do much. We have a quarterback that's been asked to play for an international league that is on par with American high school teams. He's hard pressed to make any real decisions for his personal life and isn't fully invested into his career so it's easy to see why no coach let's him stick around. Even at the very end of the book, he refuses to make a decision for his life. I found that just as frustrating as I would have if the events were real.