Hey, it’s been awhile since my last proper book review, or rather since I rewrote the entire Dark Tower series. I just read that shit again and it holds all the way up—you’re welcome!

A few times this month (including today, for another couple of hours), noted lawyer/“sportswriter” Mike Florio has generously subtracted the full (99¢) cost of his seasonal second novel On Our Way Home. The Kindle version, anyway. And if you think I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth then you didn’t win Omar Fink’s Rhodium Pirates, Marcel M. Du Plessis’s The Silent Symphony and “Captain” Doug Chamberlain’s Bury Him in Goodreads giveaways. Lucky you!

Here is the delusional back-cover cover, presented without comment (excepting “delusional”) but with emphasis (mine).

John Persepio picked a hell of a time to start seeing ghosts.

Three days before Christmas and with a client’s trial headed for the jury, Persepio starts running into a feisty old man, everywhere he goes. As John’s life spins out of control amid the holiday revelry, the one constant presence becomes the old man. And soon the old man’s wife. And eventually someone else.

On Our Way Home lands at the intersection of A Christmas Carol and It’s A Wonderful Life to create a new tradition that will unite generations, reaffirm family bonds and stir deep feelings of nostalgia. Before it all ends, John faces a very important and very unexpected question, one that he must resolve quickly.

If you read On Our Way Home this holiday season, you will make a habit of reading it every holiday season—and you will make sure your parents and children read it, too.

Mike Florio is one of the leading writers, reporters and commentators covering the NFL. His website, Pro Football Talk, has served as the primary online clearinghouse for all NFL news and analysis for more than two decades.

He carried around the basic idea for On Our Way Home for more than ten years before writing all of it during a recent December. He hopes you will enjoy reading it as much as he enjoyed writing it.

“The primary online clearinghouse for all NFL news and analysis for more than two decades,” hmm?

The On Our Way Home ebook is free on Tuesday, and that’s that for 2025
Christmas week is here. And it’s your last chance to get a free gift from your friends (or, as the case may be, enemies) at PFT.

Oh you card.

Granted, it would otherwise cost only 99¢. But free is free. On Tuesday, the On Our Way Home ebook is free for the last of five days during the 2025 holiday season. Click the link on Tuesday and download the book. Read it whenever (or not at all). But this is the best time of year to crack it open and give it a look.

“I wrote a book. Give it to someone you hate. Read it yourself, or don’t. That’s fine. I only care about the Amazon traffic.”

You’ll like it. (If you don’t, stop reading it.) It’s a compelling story with an important message about grief, reconciliation and forgiveness. It’ll make you think. It’ll hopefully make you laugh. It’ll definitely make you cry. For one more full day, you can have something that quite possibly will make you do all three, if you start reading and you decide you like it enough to not stop.

Will Mike’s freebie dig another one-star grave? Hint: I didn’t laugh, cry or give a single shit about any character, circumstance or supposed twist, but he did have a little something going for twenty pages or so halfway through. (More on that in a moment.) Nonetheless, despite (likely) having never done so with anything longer than two hundred pages, I read this fucker in one day. Why?

“What things give you energy?”
Horrid works of fiction and nonfiction. I become ever so motivated to read these turds as quickly as possible—just finish the thing, already!—and get it the hell out of my life. Trash.

On Our Way Home is bad but not offensively Flamethrowers-y. It reeks of having been hastily written by a lazy, pompous news aggregator who just slept through It’s a Wonderful Life, right down to the overreliance on adverbs, redundancies and other fluffing tricks—I can only guess the (undiscounted) paperback is printed in double-spaced twelve-point Palatino. There’s no way it was proofread, even by “the author” himself, and certainly not by an editor—is much lost upon striking random paragraphs to get it under a hundred eighty pages? I doubt it, since there isn’t much to it anyway. I haven’t read Florio’s other books and, now, I never will, but I’m not at all surprised that fiction written by a professional clickbaiter who benefits from others’ on-the-ground efforts is predictable and boring. At least cast Terry Bradshaw as one of the ghosts.

Predictable and boring, you say? Explain how!

• Put-upon white male protagonist just trying to save Christmas, OK?

“See what you did, Dustin? You made me swear in front of my daughter.”

• Miserable harpy wife:

“You find a way ruin every good mood we ever have.”

• Magical old people:

“I know precisely who I am and where I am and what I am.” He paused and dipped his head, peering at me with naked eyes over the top of the frames of his glasses. “Do you?”

• Stereotypical townspeople the protagonist considers inferior

I wanted to inspire him to become something more than Guy Who Sells Christmas Trees in December, plus whatever else he sells the rest of the year.

• Amazon reviewer: “Reads as if it was written by a child”:

[The cat] seemed to be even more disinterested than usual. Yes, I often found myself envying that damn cat.

How about irritating?

• Frequent bouts of “I used to be a lawyer, you know” exposition:

It was important to make a personal connection with each of the six jurors (only criminal cases use twelve).

• A “th” lisp-identifying device that grows old immediately:

“Thank you, Daddy. You sthaved Christhtmasth.”

• One-dimensional supporting characters:

“You sure ain’t made nothing better yet,” he said. “The way I see it, you’re the one that’s supposed to keep unfair shit from happening to my wife.”

• The modified noun “steel tub(s)” appearing eighteen damn times:

“Daddy, I sthee them.” “Yes, honey, the steel tubs are right up there.”

• Butchered half-sentences pasted together as if parts were meant to be deleted:

Nothing good would come from wallowing in days gone by, bygone days that would never return.

• Precious sentences dressed up as conceptual palindromes—Florio adores these:

I doubted whether I’d heard what I thought I heard, but I didn’t want to get into a discussion with him over whether he’d said what I thought he said.

And plot holes I can’t overlook?

• John throwing up ahead of his closing argument seemed to delay things by about thirty minutes. This is grounds for a suspension and near-mistrial?
• Motherfucking Dustin just lets the guy walk off with the steel tub, one page after threatening to prosecute for shoplifting. And then John, in front of his daughter, doesn’t go pay for it, acting instead as if he’d earned it through… temporary persecution?
• Chekov’s “live” Christmas tree might as well have shot up everybody in the house.
• John couldn’t recognize his parents having “aged” twenty-two years? Or his brother fifteen? Meanwhile, importantly, he never demands “Who the fuck are you people?” It took daughter Macy to step forward with that… and they friggin lied to her! Sure, let John end his life early so he can join these charming people in limbo for eternity.
• Linda is awful—“Once you bring the presents up from the basement, I’m going to bed”—but John is such a sad sack that they deserve each other.
• What’s this old bastard got against Subarus? I can only assume John’s is gray.
• They chucked Buster’s “portion” of the ham into the backyard? They didn’t let the dog finish it??

At this point you’d bet a free ebook that Fink, Du Plessis and Chamberlain would need to clear a space at the table– hold on, that reminds me.

“Persepio? Four?”

I turned and walked to the podium before the others could follow. “I actually need six.”

“You said four.”

“I know I said four. But our plans changed. I need six.”

“It’s a table for four. I guess we can put one at each end. It could be a little tight.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “We’ll make it work.”

Look, maybe it’s not easy to sit six people at a table designed for four. But does the hostess—earlier described as flashing “a fake smile while chomping on a wad of gum that flopped around in her mouth like a pink sweater tumbling in a dryer”—not understand the concept of two more people showing up?

One more bit of dialog, followed by my Kindle annotation. I went highlighter crazy in this thing.

“We should leave by eleven,” she called from the bathroom.

“Eleven? It starts at twelve.”

“We won’t get a good seat if we wait too long.”

“I have a feeling we don’t need to get there an hour early to get good seats. Besides, it’s church, not a Bruce Springsteen concert.”

“What does that mean?”

“What’s there to see? Unless the live nativity scene is actually going to include a real birth, there won’t be much drama.”

“So you’re saying you’d actually like to watch a live birth?”

 The fuck? 

And just in case you think I’m being unfair about the shrewish Linda, she has no depth whatsoever and is deliberately hateable. A selection:

“You’re the one who had to do this [party] tonight, not me,” I said.

[…] “Really?” she said. “That’s where you’re going? You had plenty of chances to tell me not to do this tonight. I asked you fifty times. You said, every single time, it’s fine. Go ahead. It’s fine.”

“I wasn’t really thinking.”

“That’s the problem, John. You’re never really thinking. You’re never really paying attention.”

“Why didn’t you get me up earlier?” I said to Linda.

“I figured you set your alarm.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t want a bunch of candy. I don’t need it.” She glanced at my midsection, hidden poorly inside the sweatshirt I’d found after I rolled out of bed. “You don’t need it, either.”

“That would be a great TV commercial for you,” she said, “if you ever decide to make one. I’m John Persepio. Asshole at Law. It’s actually kind of catchy.”

“It’s not funny.”

“It’s also not wrong. I’ve lived with you long enough to know the truth.”

Anyway, is that fourth one-star chair needed? Not so fast, for two reasons. The obvious one is that Florio avoids the Hallmark Channel conclusion, where these two awful people would remember why they fell in love and had three goddamn kids in the first place. It’s a bit of a downer ending, or at least it would be if I hadn’t wished them ill for the previous two hundred fifty pages, so good for him.

The second… redeeming?… quality is buried in the middle, with the family (sans Linda, of course) in search of a Christmas tree. This section—chapters fifteen to seventeen—wouldn’t make a bad short story, with the strangers drifting vaguely (successfully) through much of the affair with no indicators of their identities (having been telegraphed long before). My favorite detail in the book is Macy insisting there was a tree lot on the way to her kindergarten and John just ignoring her. Cruel, but accurate—money well spent, weekend dad.

Final takeaway: if Jill Florio suggests a clearinghouse name change to Pro Football Asshole then who aggregates the divorce settlement news? ⭐⭐