Sooley

A gripping and harrowing story painted across two continents and two glaringly different cultures and values. Exploitive, explosive, loving, tragic. Believable worlds clear and poignantly illustrated.

Grisham’s virtuosity is about finding the truth inside the fast-paced worlds of the big time, big money and big lies with characters to love, especially a unique one like Sooley. Emerging from Africa with only the clothes on his back and all the raw talent to make it he followed his dream of getting through a maze of obstacles to win a scholarship and a spot on the team. But the dream meant nothing without saving his family from a nightmare halfway around the world. Go behind the public relations spoon-fed images and the money-making commodity fantasy version.

This is an extraordinarily enjoyable, but a hard story that has never been written about real or fictionized. It feels real. And sometimes true-life stories have their limitations that can only be told through imagination, a deft touch, and research.

Massive dreams of the young talent destined for big things is universal, but Sooley’s life is the extreme case. He and his family trying to escape impoverishment and civil unrest in South Sudan, hell on earth where dreams are killed wholesale. All odds were weighted against him. His determination and destiny allowed Sooley to glimpse the future and learn the hard way to navigate the present the only way he knew, never give up.

It is about basketball but it’s really about drawing distinctions between people with huge hearts and those that don’t and the stark contrast between unrest and hope. Just as one doesn’t need to love crime to love reading crime thrillers, you don’t need to love or even like basketball to love Sooley. I found others who loved Sooley never saw a basketball game in their life. Basketball is merely the backdrop. Art drawn from metaphor is inspired from the fiery world we inhabit and pockets of corruption that infect it.

The ride rocks a lot of boats. Just as one expects from the best.