By: Garvit Gupta
The book, Theodore Boone: The accused written by John Grisham, is a great novel that I read for my book talk. Theodore, or Theo for short, is the main character and detective in this book. He is very outgoing. His government teacher describes him as “natural on his feet”. Theo is anything but shy. He is the captain of the Eighth Grade Debate team and enjoys public speaking. Theo is also very helpful. Since both of his parents are lawyers and Theo wants to work in law when he grows up, Theo goes around giving legal advice to his friends. An important setting in this book is the hallway in school that Theo’s locker is in. Here, the first hate-crime against Theo was committed. The hate crime against Theo was robbing his locker.…show more content… Some of the suspense was created by the author adding more and more complications to the plot. For instance, an example of another plot complication is “If I want to call Theo a jailbird, then I’ll call Theo a jailbird.” (Grisham 118) This method is so compelling because Theo is really upset and scared that the police are after him, and the only place he feels safe is school. So now that he his getting bullied in school, it takes away this sense of safety and adds fear and tension to the readers and Theo. Another way Author John Grisham created suspense was delaying an event the reader knew was coming. When April goes to Theo and tells him that she thinks that Jonah and Jessie are the ones doing all this, the readers know that it was indeed Jonah and Jessie, but Theo does not think so. He says “Maybe, I don’t know. Let me think about it” (Grisham 240). This signaled that Theo was delaying an event that the readers knew was coming. This method worked so well because the readers knew the event was coming and were waiting for it. Delaying this event gave time for the author to build more tension. For example, while the readers were waiting for this event to happen, the police increased their investigation and found even more wrong clues leading to Theo. So when this event came, it seemed more important and tense. All in all, suspense in this book was created by adding more complication to the plot and delaying…show more content… There were many things that I enjoyed in this book, for example I though that the crime was well developed. For example: There was many pieces of evidence planted by the criminals to convict Theo wrongly. This made the story even more fun to read because Theo had to prove his innocence against so many pieces of evidence (which is hard to do). Another great point that I thought this book was good in was developing every single character you would meet in this book. Every minor character were described a lot. So you never got lost in the book with what is happening or why is a character doing something. Though no book is perfect, there things about this book that weren't as good. One problem was that you basically knew who committed the crime from somewhere in the middle of the book. This kind of ruined the anticipation of finding out who committed the crime. Another thing that I didn’t like in this book was the lack of action. Most of the crime solving and finding clues was done by technology in this book, so as a result there was basically no action in this book. Though I rated this book a seven, this is a great book and must be read by all mystery