A Painted House - Softcover

Grisham, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712670394 ISBN 13: 9780712670395

Publisher: Century, 2001

Synopsis

The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. it was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with two weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist high to my father, almost over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a 'good crop'. Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eight acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it. or six weeks they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and sometimes each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven year old could possibly be prepared for, and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever.

About this title

Product Description

Physical description; 388 p. ; 24 cm. Subjects; Boys - Arkansas - Fiction. Farm life - Arkansas - Fiction. Cotton farmers - Arkansas - Fiction.

Review

In A Painted House, John Grisham is less concerned with tight plotting and legal shenanigans than with the roots of that country life which taught him much of what he knows about being human. In the early autumn of 1952, seven-year-old Luke Chandler is helping his family pick cotton on his grandfather's Arkansas farm; times are hard--Luke's uncle Ricky is off fighting in Korea and rent on the land, interest on crop loans, is due. Tension abounds--between the hillbilly Spruill family and the Mexican labourers who between them make up the farm's workforce; between the bully Hank Spruill and the Sisco family, one of whom he has killed in a fight; between the Chandlers and their neighbours the Larchers over Libby Larcher's baby--which she claims is Ricky's. This is a tight and yet achingly nostalgic book about growing up and moving on--the few months it covers are ones in which young Luke learns some important lessons about the way of the world, and his place in it. Grisham writes here with a sensitivity and sense of time and place which have not always been his most obvious virtues--it is a remarkable book. --Roz Kaveney

About this edition

• Publisher: Century
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0712670394
• ISBN 13: 9780712670395
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400