Rating: 
Summary: Grisham's Very Best
Review: A Painted House is simply John Grisham's finest novel ever and one of the best books I have read. His writing puts you directly into the story. You feel as if your living it and don't want it to end. If you only read one book read this one.
Rating:
Summary: On The Painted House
Review: This is an excellent book! I have been a Grisham fan for years and love his thrillers, like The Firm and The Pelican Brief. I was very excited to read this, a very different type of book than I was used to for Grisham, but it turned out to be my favorite! The story is very fast paced and the characters are developed well. Luke, the main character, is mischievous at times and very likeable. It was exciting to see what he was up to next. I would like to highly recommend this book to any reader.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: In this novel seven year old Luke chandler is a farm boy in 1952. This book at times lacks excitment. With nat many plot twists or suspense this book could have used more. Although some parts were exciting most wasn't. This book however had memorable charechters. You want to know everything about them and everything that happens to them afterword. The only problem is seven year old Luke Chandler sounds more like a Fifteen year old. The worry his family has for there ninteen yaer old relative fighting in Korea it makes you feel like you are right there with the chandlers in there heartbreak and suffering. This story may not be the best, but the charechters sure were. The style of writing was also well done the plot just needed some retuning. All in all Grisham returns with his same writing talent just not the same story line and plot twist tallent. The ending however was unexpected and one of Grishams good endings.
Rating: 
Summary: Surprisingly different
Review: John Grisham surprised me with this story, but pleasantly so. He did not fail to keep my attention. He is indeed a wonderful story teller. I don't normally like sequels but would love to know what happens to Luke in the big city and whether he eventually fulfills his dream of becoming a national baseball player. Grisham conveyed such a descriptive setting in the cotton fields. I felt like I was on the ground beside Luke as he looked up to the sky between the tall plants. I was leary at first, knowing that Grisham has written most of his books around the legal world. This story, particularly, took me back to days I've heard of from my grandparents and parents. I actually felt as though I were stepping back in time. He is truly one of the best writers I have read!
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful story
Review: A PAINTED HOUSE is a story which tells you about hard times through a 7 year old boys eyes. It's exciting, sad, funny - it has it all. I must admit that in the beginning it sometimes didn't happen very much, but after a while I came to love the characters and I just wanted to know what was going to happen with them all.
You shouldn't miss this book!
Rating:
Summary: My First Grisham Book - and it was Great!
Review: I had only two reasons to read this book: 1) My book group was reading it; 2) I moved to the South about 2 years ago, and felt I should learn more about it. I was very pleasantly surprised at how well-written it was! I had always assumed Grisham was one of those "genre" writers who relies on murders, mysteries, etc., (plot) to sell his book, rather than working on being a good writer, and having the writing sell his book. This book is very good at showing a "slice of life": life on a farm in the Arkansas Delta, at a time when it was very difficult eking out a living at farm work. You really get a sense of how terribly hard picking cotton was, and how even a 7-year old was expected to pick. You get a feel for the people, and the economic differences between them; the sharecroppers vs. those who were luckier, and "rented" land, etc. I was disappointed in the New York Times Book Review of this book. The critic panned Grisham for failing to depict any African-Americans. The critic had no idea that there were few African-Americans in the Arkansas Delta at that time. All in all, I would definitely recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: I want my 6 u$d dollars back
Review: Its genre undefined between suspense and "customs and manners", fails as both. Boring, boring, boring. Nothing happens. French ending. Avoid this one
Rating:
Summary: Brent Smiths A Painted House
Review: A Painted House is one of Grisham's best works yet. The story of a poor Arkansas farming family is told from the seven year old boy Luke. The story centers on the families cotton farm and the difficulties they have with their hired workers, the spurills and some migrant Mexicans. With a combination of murder and the everyday trials of farm life this book makes for a very exciting read. I highly reccomend the book to anyone who enjoys a good book.
Rating:
Summary: Another Hit
Review: What a great book! John Grisham takes another unusual road in this one but it is a most interesting road. Told through the eyes of a child, it is an easy, fascinating read. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Paint dries.
Review: A novel centered around a 7 year-old boy, Luke Chandler, growing up on a cotton farm in 1952 rural Arkansas in an extended family (parents, grandparents, one cousin in Korea, even the hillbilly and Mexican farm workers sometimes serving as family surrogates), a novel in which this family battles the elements (natural and economic) on an everyday basis and in which having a "painted house" is the feature that most readily distinguishes the comfortable from the struggling, a novel in which the special weekly event is the Saturday afternoon bath (!!!) and the trip into town for the matinee - such a novel has to have a lot of good things going for it.Especially when baseball is a recurrent theme. There's a sandlot game that figures into the story and a picnic that features the annual game between the Baptists and the Methodists. But nothing brings to the reader the sights and sounds of rural America in the Truman/Eisenhower era more readily than a big old-fashioned radio tuned into KMOX on a summer evening and the raspy voice of Harry Carey (announcing for the Cardinals and not the Cubs!!!) drowning out the sound of the crickets chirping in the hollers and the box fan whirring in the living room as he dramatically announces the approach of the great Stan Musial to home plate before a cheering crowd at Sportsman's Park. The author, John Grisham, himself is no mean painter, and there is something quite elegant about his use of the radio to connect the Chandlers not only to baseball but to Edward Murrow and rest of the outside world, particularly the war in Korea where Luke's cousin is stationed. Luke has never even been so far from Black Oak, Arkansas as to have seen a Cardinal game. But the radio enables him to use his imagination to "see" every dimension of Sportsman's Park; to "see" the ball explode off of Musial's bat and bounce off of the right field wall, and to "watch" Musial slide into third base with a triple. "I could see him get to his feet as the crowd went nuts," Luke reports. "Then with both hands, he slapped the dirt off his white uniform with the bright red trim." Of course, as Luke "sees" this on the radio, the reader "sees" it too. I'm sure there's a literary term for the device that describes how Grisham makes both his literary creation and the reader concurrently use their respective imaginations, and I only wish that I knew what this term was. Grisham does an excellent job of drawing the reader into this world. You can see the endless rows of cotton that make up the Chandler farm; you can feel the rain that threatens to bring the flood that will wipe out virtually an entire harvest and the back-breaking effort that went into growing it. You can hear the drone of the hard-shell Baptist preacher scolding his parishioners for a host of sins, real and imagined, and squirm uncomfortably at his tirade in the heavy air of a summer afternoon. You can taste the fried chicken and ice cream at the picnic preceding the Baptist/Methodist baseball game, though I'm at a loss to understand why the players are eating that huge meal BEFORE the game. However, the main theme of the novel are the moral dilemmas that engage Luke as he learns a number of secrets of life-or-death importance which the dictates of conventional morality would have him disclose. Offset against this are the dire consequences that would result to his family if Luke followed those dictates. Yet while Luke and his family are engaging, if taciturn, characters, Luke's dilemmas never quite piqued my interest as much as did his surroundings. I might be unfairly comparing this novel to Grisham's "The Firm". I don't remember "The Firm" having such colorful imagery, but its relentless pace, underlied by the pace at which the young attorney sacrifices himself for the firm, shows how he is inexorably being bound by its insatiable demands and hints at a revelation that will spark the novel's climax. The bucolic summertime tempo of "Painted House" is not so taut, and no such revelations are promised or delivered. The struggle for survival that challenges Luke's family at the beginning of the novel is not fundamentally different from that which occupies them at the end. For a prepubescent ball hawk, Luke seems far more interested in the opposite sex than he has a right to be. How can he possess both a 7 year-old's naïve certainty that future stardom with the St. Louis Cardinals will liberate him from farm life and a 17 year-old's interest in long brown legs? Modernity has poked its nose into Black Oak by the novel's end. Farmers are picking up and heading for the assembly lines of Detroit. A television set actually makes its way into one resident's home, and Luke, like millions of real-life contemporaries, is awed by the fact that he can REALLY see the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees in the World Series. But I'm inclined to think that our worldly-wise youngster should display some brief foreboding that this wonderful new device deprives him of the ability to use his imagination to "see" the game on the radio. If one could insert oneself into the text of this novel, would it be fair to tell Luke that he has another 12 years to wait until his beloved Cardinals make it into the Series? That this new brightly-lit oracle will create a breed of athletes and executives corrupted by the almighty dollar? And a generation of chicken-hearted pitchers unwilling to manfully challenge the Stan Musials of their era - hello, Barry Bonds - to display their talents? To say nothing of the other evils that the post-war era has in store for American society in general? And for the state of Arkansas in particular? 4 stars are gladly awarded to John Grisham for this contribution.
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