A Painted House

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by: John Grisham

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780385501200
Edition: 1st
ISBN: 038550120X
Label: Doubleday
Manufacturer: Doubleday
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 400
Publication Date: February 06, 2001
Publisher: Doubleday
Release Date: February 06, 2001
Studio: Doubleday

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Alternate Versions: Click to Display

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Editorial Review:

Amazon.com Review:
Ever since he published The Firm in 1991, John Grisham has remained the undisputed champ of the legal thriller. With A Painted House, however, he strikes out in a new direction. As the author is quick to note, this novel includes "not a single lawyer, dead or alive," and readers will search in vain for the kind of lowlife machinations that have been his stock-in-trade. Instead, Grisham has delivered a quieter, more contemplative story, set in rural Arkansas in 1952. It's harvest time on the Chandler farm, and the family has hired a crew of migrant Mexicans and "hill people" to pick 80 acres of cotton. A certain camaraderie pervades this bucolic dream team. But it's backbreaking work, particularly for the 7-year-old narrator, Luke: "I would pick cotton, tearing the fluffy bolls from the stalks at a steady pace, stuffing them into the heavy sack, afraid to look down the row and be reminded of how endless it was, afraid to slow down because someone would notice."

What's more, tensions begin to simmer between the Mexicans and the hill people, one of whom has a penchant for bare-knuckles brawling. This leads to a brutal murder, which young Luke has the bad luck to witness. At this point--with secrets, lies, and at least one knife fight in the offing--the plot begins to take on that familiar, Grisham-style momentum. Still, such matters ultimately take a back seat in A Painted House to the author's evocation of time and place. This is, after all, the scene of his boyhood, and Grisham waxes nostalgic without ever succumbing to deep-fried sentimentality. Meanwhile, his account of Luke's Baptist upbringing occasions some sly (and telling) humor:

I'd been taught in Sunday school from the day I could walk that lying would send you straight to hell. No detours. No second chances. Straight into the fiery pit, where Satan was waiting with the likes of Hitler and Judas Iscariot and General Grant. Thou shalt not bear false witness, which, of course, didn't sound exactly like a strict prohibition against lying, but that was the way the Baptists interpreted it.

Whether Grisham will continue along these lines, or revert to the judicial shark tank for his next book, is anybody's guess. But A Painted House suggests that he's perfectly capable of telling an involving story with nary a subpoena in sight. --James Marcus

Product Description:
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 three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, 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 eighty 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.

For 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.

A Painted House is a moving story of one boy's journey from innocence to experience.


On-sale February 6, 2001.




Rating: - Excellent book that stays with you
Extremely pleasant and relaxed reading, no tension, no suspense even if suspenseful things do happen - the story and the characters stayed with me. They stayed with me so much that I dreamed more story!

Is this a book of fiction? Eli Chandler, Pappy, was a real person who was known to baseball.

One thing for sure, the way he wrote the story gave me a real appreciation for what cotton farming was like - an utterly dreadful job!

I'd like to know what happened ... Read More

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Rating: - "A PAINTED HOUSE" BY JOHN GRISHAM
A GREAT BOOK!! DIFFERENT FROM OTHER J. GRISHAM BOOKS THAT I HAVE READ,
BUT I LOVED IT. 5 STAR REVIEW!!

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Rating: - Loved it
This is one of my most favorite books of all time. I havent read it in years and am thinking of reading it again. Such a wonderful story.

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Rating: - Grisham shines in non-lawyer tome
John Grisham has learned how to end a book - although it's not always a happy ending or the one we'd like. "A Painted House" is a wonderful slice-of-life, coming of age (even at 7 years old) story. Great descriptive writing, wonderful imagery. A good read from start to finish.

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Rating: - A nice change of pace from the courtroom stuff but...
I enjoyed the change of pace from Grisham's normal books, but like a lot of other reviewers, I didn't think it was believable that Luke was a 7-year-old, and that it ended sort of abruptly with seemingly no resolution of anything. The story seemed to be building up to a climax that never happened. While I did enjoy reading about life in rural Arkansas in the '50s, I just felt so let down at the end. I also thought that Tally, the teenage daughter of the Spruills, got a little too much enjoyment out of ... Read More

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