- Hardcover: 400 pages
- Publisher: Doubleday; First Edition edition (Feb 6 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 038550120X
- ISBN-13: 978-0385501200
- Product Dimensions: 16.2 x 3.3 x 24.2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 408 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (974 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #458,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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
From Publishers Weekly
Who needs lawyers? Not Grisham, in his captivating new novel, now between hardcovers after serialization in the Oxford American. Here there are hardscrabble farmers instead, and dirt-poor itinerant workers and a seven-year-old boy who grows up fast in a story as rich in conflict and incident as any previous Grisham and as nuanced as his very best. It's September 1952 in rural Arkansas when young narrator Luke Chandler notes that "the hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day." These folk are in Black Oak for the annual harvest of the cotton grown on the 80 acres that the Chandlers rent. The three generations of the Chandler family treat their workers more kindly than most farmers do, including engaging in the local obsession--playing baseball--with them, but serious trouble arises among the harvesters nonetheless. Most of it centers around Hank Spruill, a giant hillbilly with an equally massive temper, who one night in town beats a man dead and who throughout the book rubs up against a knife-wielding Mexican who is dating Hank's 17-year-old sister on the sly, leading to another murder. In fact, there's a mess of trouble in Luke's life, from worries about his uncle Ricky fighting in Korea to concerns about the nearby Latcher family and its illegitimate newborn baby, who may be Ricky's son. And then there are the constant fears about the weather, as much a character in this novel as any human, from the tornado that storms past the farm to the downpours that eventually flood the fields, ruining the crop and washing Luke and his family into a new life.Grisham admirers know that this author's writing has evolved with nearly every book, from the simple mechanics that made The Firm click to the manifestations of grace that made The Testament such a fine novel of spiritual reckoning. The mechanics are still visible here--as a nosy, spying boy, Luke serves as a nearly omnipresent eye to spur the novel along its course--but so, too, are characters that no reader will forget, prose as clean and strong as any Grisham has yet laid down and a drop-dead evocation of a time and place that mark this novel as a classic slice of Americana. Agent, David Gernert. (One-day laydown, Feb. 6)FORECAST: Will Grisham's fans miss the lawyers? Not hardly. This is a Grisham novel all the way, despite its surface departures from the legal thrillers, and it will be received as such, justifying the 2.8-million first printing. (For more on Grisham, see Book News, p. 178)
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same days. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same days. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Paint your own house first,
This review is from: A Painted House (Mass Market Paperback)
A PAINTED HOUSE was good if you enjoy reading about farm life, and people living with their in-laws and working hard. I did have a problem with the main character. We have a 7 year old boy who should have been about 12 or 13. I have never met a 7 year old with such maturity. He is even interested in teenage girls. The boy worried about everything under the sun and could keep secrets better than a priest. If you can get past the fact, that the boy is too young, and you enjoy a good story about farm life in the south, this one is for you. But I do have to say that I did read one other book with a seven-year-old in it, and that was a little more believable since the child had something like Asperberger's or DID, or some such syndrome where children are more intelligent than they should be at that age (BARK OF THE DOGWOOD-very funny and moving). So don't get too hung up on the kid's age. Painted House is a very well-told tale by one of America's most-loved authors.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Satisfying Rural Tale,
By richard_t "richard_t" (Overseas) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Painted House (Mass Market Paperback)
I'm not a fan of Grisham's regular pop thriller schmaltz, so I was reluctant to pick up this one, even though assured that it's a new direction for him. Well, I'm convinced. Grisham can write. He can put together dialogue and local color that's not in a Chicago courthouse, and he can pace a slow story with an evolving plot. "A Painted House" is sort of a Steinbeck tale, following a rural Arkansas farm family for a few months in 1952 as they pick their cotton crop, endure the elements, and move among their neighbors and hired hands. It's a nice story, dark and sometimes forbidding, but always inviting. Seven year-old Luke's yearning for matinee cowboy movies and a red Cardinals baseball jacket ring true and bring a smile. Grisham's attention to detail, the small-town gossip, the back-lot garden, the annual ballgame, all create a deep and satisfying rural tale. It's not real Steinbeck, but it's not bad, and it's a huge step up for Grisham.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Ending seemed too abrupt and incomplete.,
By A Customer
This review is from: A Painted House (Mass Market Paperback)
I was into the book and enjoying the way the story was being told. Unfortunately, the loose ends never got "tied up." I thought the author could have given us some insight as to what happened to several of the main characters. Is a sequel planned??
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