I read A Painted House decades ago and I recalled that it was the only book by Grisham that was not a legal thriller. There isn’t a lawyer anywhere in the story. I remembered enjoying the book and decided to read it again.

The story plays in the late summer and fall of 1952 on a small cotton farm outside a small cotton town outside Jonesboro, Arkansas. Luke Chandler is a 7-year-old boy. He is the narrator and we see life in rural Arkansas through his boyhood eyes. An only child, he lives with his grandparents and parents who are farming the land, growing cotton as their crop, and keeping chickens, pigs and a large vegetable garden for food. Life is not easy on the farm. More often than one would expect, bad weather and floods can ruin a crop, leaving the farmer without income for the year and debts for their expenses. After the planting is done in the spring, everything depends on a couple of months of good weather in September and October, when the cotton is ready to be picked.  During the picking season, Mexican laborers are coming in, and the “hill people” from the Ozarks come down to make some money working the harvest. The townspeople call them the hillbillies. The farmers depend on those helpers. Even with all hands on deck, including the children, there is no way a cotton crop can be brought in during the short time available before winter moves in.

Two groups of laborers, one consisting of 10 Mexicans living in the barn, and another a family of hill people camping in the front yard, are hired on to help. Each group has one very dangerous member in it, and quickly conflicts arise, some of them only visible to Luke’s eyes. He is left with no choice but to start keeping secrets and in a few cases he is even forced to lie.

A Painted House illustrates life mid-century on a cotton farm in the south and it exposes the hardships the farmers and sharecroppers face just to survive. It shows the exodus of young people to the cities in the north, where jobs with safe incomes in car factories in Detroit and Chicago promise a better life and a future. Only the elders are left to fend for themselves, while they dream what might have been.