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    A Painted House
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    A Painted House
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    A Painted House
    Audiobook (abridged)12 hours

    A Painted House

    Written by John Grisham

    Narrated by David Lansbury

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateFeb 6, 2001
    ISBN9780553753578
    Unavailable
    A Painted House

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    Reviews for A Painted House

    3.5/5

    1,659 ratings71 reviews

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    • 4/5
      He is a master of whatever genre he writes in. Legal thrillers are not my cup of tea and I am grateful that he wrote a literary novel about his childhood for us to read. Enjoyed it and would want to read it again
    • 4/5
      This is the story of Luke Chandler he is 7 year old growing up on a cotton farm in Arkansas, the book is set in 1952.Luke's family hire some Mexicans and Hill people to pick the Harvest. There is a murder in town that Luke witnesses then a few weeks later one of the Mexicans kill the murderer. Luke loves Baseball and misses his Uncle Ricky who is in Korea fighting the War. He also with the help of the labourers starts painting the House they live in.Times are hard for the Chandlers, its tough work picking Cotton and there is the Weather to think about. In the end Luke along his Parents decide to move to the City so his Father can get a job in a Car factory. OK book this.
    • 5/5
      Set in 1952 Arkansas A Painted House is the story of a harvest time on a poor cotton farm through the eyes of a seven year old boy. Whilst this may sound boring, the two dead bodies, peeping tom activities, illegitimate babies and nature's proclivity to fight man's will gives plenty of material to keep you drawn in and turning the pages. That's without considering the picturesque painting of 1950s farming life that flows from the pages, a time when there wasn't a tv and phone in the farmhouse, a time when a bad harvest meant you only ate what you could grow.Very entertaining and interesting book.Oh, and a house gets some paint on it.
    • 4/5
      Great book!
    • 3/5
      Grisham man. I totally thought this was a coming of age drama (and yes, you could classify it thast way) But then it turns into this sort of crazy thriller where the poor kid is terrified out of his mind from just a few too many psychopaths in his life!!
    • 4/5
      Luke is a wonderfully mischievous seven year old boy growing up in rural Arkansas during the time of the Korean War. He lives with his mother and father and his father's parents in a small unpainted house on a farm. They are cotton farmers. When cotton picking time arrives, Luke's quota for the day is 50 pounds. This story is told through Luke's experiences of watching the adults worry about the weather, the price of cotton, hiring Mexicans and Hill People to help pick cotton and through his part in a struggling proud family who all live, work, and worry together.

      Anyone who has ever known a seven year old boy will love Luke as he narrates the hiring of the Mexicans and watches the hill people move in and camp in his front yard right over home plate. Luke's ambition is to grow up and become a baseball player for the Cardinals in St. Louis. As you read through the days of cotton picking and some difficult adult situations that Luke sees happen, you hope that all his dreams will come true and he will be able to get away from the hardships he has witnessed.

      John Grisham does not need a courtroom and a chase scene to write a memorable book with characters that will come to mind again and again. I have enjoyed his legal thrillers, but A Painted House offers up a beautiful sensitivity that proves he can write just as well when he reaches out to a new format.
    • 3/5
      Surprisingly good. I gather it's semi-autobiographical, too. Give a good insight into what it meant to be a poor cotton farmer back in the day.
    • 5/5
      Many John Grisham fans don't like this book. It isn't a thriller or a legal mystery. It is a literary coming-of-age novel. It's my favorite Grisham novel.It has one flaw--aside from not being a thriller. The MC, Luke, is supposed to be seven-years-old. Don't believe it. When John tells you he is seven, you just substitute eleven. Luke has too much social awareness to be seven. (Guess Grisham hasn't been around enough seven-year-olds.) So, Luke is a socially precocious eleven-year-old.The story occurs at cotton harvest time in 1952 in northeast Arkansas. Luke lives on his family's small cotton farm. His family hires a family of hillbillies and a truck load of Mexican guest laborers. Conflicts occur between the two groups. Luke sees much of the worst and the best humanity has to offer--sometimes in the same person.If you like literary fiction, read this book. If not then just move on to something else.
    • 4/5
      I do enjoy John Grisham's legal thrillers, but I am always curious when an author writes out his or her usual genre. I wasn't disappointed in this tale of a seven-year-old boy in Arkansas in 1952. David Lansbury was the narrator and I think he did an excellent job of both the young, old, female and male voices.The first impression that I had of the beginning is that farming cotton is a risky and thankless job. When the crop is plentiful you get a low price. When the crop is scarce, you get a much better one. There is no way to succeed at it over time. There are several separate groups in this book who were to pick the family's cotton, the family that raised it and the migrant workers. The hill people in this book were proud that they had painted houses. They later stopped coming to pick the cotton. There were also the people from Mexico, hardworking and poor.Luke Chandler, the seven-year-old, knew about the hopelessness of growing cotton and promised his mother that he would get an education and do something more promising. But this summer, they had to harvest the cotton, maybe for the last time. Luke is picking alongside the rest of them.He happens to be a witness of a beating that turned into murder and later even see something so horrible that he could not tell his family or anyone else. I enjoyed listening to this book but was disappointed when it ended. It seemed too abrupt and inconclusive. Still I recommend it.
    • 4/5
      Grisham can be a great writer. I either love his books or they are just ok. This one was great. His first literary novel. My only issue was that it ended 50 pages too soon. He didn't finish the story. Too many ends left dangling.
    • 5/5
      A heartfelt tale of life of an Arkansas cotton farming family, set in 1952. Grisham has spun an extraordinary tale and totally captivates the reader if describing listening to a Cardinals baseball game on the radio or one of the many surprising events that take place throughout the book. The pacing is brilliant and is told through the eyes of seven year old Luke Chandler.
    • 5/5
      This is to me is one of is best books. It was a book that made you love the characters who struggled through hard times. At the end you wanted to know what happened to them in years to come. Mr. Grisham? A sequel please, he could become a lawyer. I have given this book to many as gifts, recommended it and re-read it. All but one person loved it and was disappointed it was not about a lawyer or trial. It's sad when authors are only given credit for writing about one thing. Writers aren't one dimensional folks! They dream about many things just as we all do. Give this little book a shot, I think you'll love it!
    • 5/5
      A different book for Grisham, but a good one. A simple story well told - I enjoyed it.
    • 4/5
      boy tells story of life in Arkansas on a cotton farm. He is 7 yrs old and life is not easy, secreats seam to rule his life. 80 acres of rented land does not earn much. They hire 10 Mexicans & a family from Ozarks to help pick the cotton. Life with all these extra people proves for a extra helping of horries for a small boy.
    • 3/5
      The summer of 1952 brought migrant workers to Luke's home along with a brutal murder, a fatherless baby, and a painted house. I like John Grisham, but this isn't one of my favorite books. I had a hard time finishing it although I still needed to figure out who done it.
    • 4/5
      Since legal thrillers are not a genre I read I balked when someone tried to convince me to read this book. I'm sure John Grisham is a good writer but he's just not my thing. However...I'm grateful now that I gave in. It was a touching story of a child growing up in very rural, cotton-growing Arkansas and the things he sees, hears and deals with over the picking season during his seventh year. A big criticism I keep seeing about this book is the conclusion and I have to disagree. I thought it was appropriate. It leaves us thinking about a lot of things that didn't get tied up neatly and the end. Well, real life is like that, too, it just keeps going. Maybe someday there will be a sequel.
    • 4/5
      What can I say! I loved it...
    • 3/5
      As someone else said, this book reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird. I did enjoy the characters, and yes it is different from any other Grisham book, so it shows how versatile he is as a writer. It didn't finish properly though.
    • 3/5
      Okay read. I prefer stories that have a more complete conclusion.
    • 4/5
      This is only my second Grisham. My husband says that it is different from the rest of his. He is a good story teller, and the first person narrative from a seven year old was really interesting. Good story. I listened to an audio version.
    • 2/5
      Pleasant enough, but it needs something else to offset the endless, grinding, back-breaking rural nostalgia. If it had been written 50 years earlier it would have been a wonderful starting point for a Rogers and Hammerstein musical.Obviously, if you have a story with a child narrator set in the rural southern US, you are expecting poverty, prejudice, rape, murder, and miscarriages of justice. Or some kind of melodramatic climax, anyway. This book does have its moments, it's true, but they all seem to fizzle out rather: Nothing that happens in the story really has any serious consequences for the main characters. Life goes on, there'll be another church picnic next year, and the Cardinals will have another crack at winning the baseball competition. That's pretty much how real life works, but transferred to fiction it's rather dull. It's a bit strange to have something that looks as though it's meant to be a coming-of-age novel, but where the characters don't develop at all in the course of the story. Young Luke is just as worldly-wise at the beginning as he is at the end.A child narrator automatically implies that the author has to cheat a bit to get the right mix of immature perception and adult hindsight, so that we believe it's really a child talking to us, but get a story that is interesting enough to retain the attention of an adult reader over a few hundred pages. Grisham evidently doesn't have the Harper Lee touch, and entirely fails to make Luke a plausible seven-year-old. Eleven or twelve he might just get away with, but even allowing for the fact that we're talking tough kids in the depths of the countryside, seven is just too young for the voice Luke talks to us in.
    • 4/5
      Little Luke's World Comes Alive with Mr. Grisham creative genius! In "A Painted House", Mr. Grisham reveals the thinking of the 7 year old Luke Chandler I just loved the scene in which Mr. Grisham explains how Luke, the only son of a cotton farmer family that are living on the edge of poverty in the state of Arkansas feels about sitting through a Baptist church sermon on a very hot morning. I had to smile as Luke tried to understand how the Sisco boy would go to heaven even though he never had to sit in church every Sunday like he had too.There are many wonderful scenes in the novel and won't expound on them.It's a great story for adults and young adults. And it's refreshing to read this "home grown" story from Mr. Grisham. Highly recommend.
    • 4/5
      Substance: Faithful recreation of cotton-farming in Arkansas in the fifties. The narrator is maybe a little young for what he does, at age 7 (9 would be more believable).
    • 3/5
      Not your typical John Grisham legal drama but still a good read.
    • 4/5
      A book that proves John Grisham can write other than law stories. A very good story of living in southern cotton country of the early 1950's.
    • 4/5
      When I began reading this, I was a-skeered it was going to be like The Grapes of Wrath which I couldn't stand. (Just writing The Grapes of Wrath made be seize--oops, there I go again.) Fortunately for me, the story was told from a young boy's point of view and I enjoyed it very much. Just a nice snapshot of growing up in Arkansas--busting a living picking cotton, back in the days when there were more have-not people than haves.Reminded me of the stories my grandparents told.
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this very much, although different from Grisham's others. Believable tale of mid-century southern life. I was impressed.
    • 4/5
      Very good - extremely well written. Expected an ending like Grapes of Wrath so it didn't live up to the great billing everybody gave it, but still a great book.
    • 3/5
      This was the first book by Grisham that I have read. Not a bad story but a bit slow at times, the ending did not wrap things up in my opinion.
    • 4/5
      I'd never read a Grisham novel before as I don't like courtroom drama but this book was given to me by a friend and I really enjoyed it. Reminded me a lot of To Kill a Mockingbird. Loved the simplicity of Lukes story telling of his life living on a cotton farm.