A Painted House - John Grisham > Reviews > A Painted House

Author's product rating:   

Would you listen to it again?	Yes
Story	Good
Characters	Good
Listenability	Pretty compelling but not addictive
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?	Quite good

Advantages:	Its by John Grisham
Disadvantages:	A little slow paced

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

If John Grisham was an actor he would be more typecast than Joe Pesci, Sharon Stone or that guy who is in American Pie, Road Trip and Dude Where's My car? (You know the one!) It was because of this reason “A Painted House” was a massive surprise. With Grisham you can normally guarantee a good tense legal thriller but this book is anything but.

“A Painted House” was serialised in the American magazine the Oxford American. It was not your usual serialisation where the best parts or even specific chapters are taken from the book. Grisham agreed to write a few chapters for each bi-monthly release of the magazine so that the whole story would be sold over the year. I am a huge fan of most of Grisham’s work so I thought about getting the magazine but I never quite got round to it. I think he did this to test the waters with a new topic. It got good reviews and the decision was made to make it the annual Grisham release. I was a little disappointed with this as I thought there may be 2 books by my favourite author this year but never mind, quality over quantity and all that.

The story is of 7-year old Luke Chandler’s summer on a Cotton farm in Arkansas. Not exactly a riveting topic but it certainly holds the attention. The tale follows the cotton-picking season and the impact it has on the Chandler household, the Mexican labourers they employ and the “hill people” they hire for help. There are enough characters for sub plots and interaction without all of the main characters being involved. However the story is very slow paced (probably intentional given the subject) and at times you feel like skipping a few pages to the next “event”. This is my only criticism of the book but as I say it is probably intentional to get over Luke’s feelings and if so it works very well.

This is not a book that has a huge deal happening in it. However, if like me, you enjoy Grisham’s writing style you will probably find this to be an interesting change from his usual fare. Without wanting to give too much away I like the amount of things that are left unresolved in the book. It is like an actual account of a 7-year old’s life where you don’t understand a lot of things and there will be people you may never see again. This was my favourite thing in the whole book, the way Grisham seemed to get into the mind of a 7-year old (not sure I’d view that as a compliment right enough but never mind).

This could be the first Grisham book to produce a sequel which I would definitely be interested in. There are endless possibilities with where to take the story and one thing would love to see would be for Grisham to do what Jeffrey Archer did with “Kane and Able” and “The Prodigal Daughter”. Where parts of the original story are told through a different character then events are taken on. I think this would work in this case and I’d be interested to see what others thought.

Definitely not Grisham’s best but not his worst either.