Not only are there no nagging social issues in Grisham's cotton country of 50 years ago, there are no black people. Grisham's prose is thin beside any of those three so is the sensibility, and soon enough ''A Painted House'' starts to look like, well, a whitewash. Or ''To Kill a Mockingbird'' or William Faulkner's last book, ''The Reivers.'' But if you're enjoying this sentimental reminiscence, it is best not to make the comparison. And at times, as the cotton bolls glisten in the sun, you can't help thinking of other coming-of-age novels from the South: ''Huckleberry Finn'' That's how he witnesses two people getting murdered and a baby getting born amid storms, flood and scandals in that long late-summer

That he doesn't spend a lot of time spying on anyone and everyone who interests him. He prays like a good Baptist and worries about sin, but he's not such a pious little boy Louis Cardinals warmup jacket out of the Sears catalog. He roots for Stan Musial and longs for a St. He feels the first inchoate hints ofĭesire for pretty girls. Luke watches his parents and grandparents barely clawing a living out of the land, and he knows that they and he will have to escape someday. He can read, and he can write cursive script, and he can figure out just about everything you or I could figure outĪbout what he sees going on around him.

He's a real smart kid, but not a smart aleck. Luke Chandler is the name of the little boy who is coming of age. To my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. ''The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day.

The world of the novel is sketched elegantly, and in its In ''A Painted House,'' Grisham gives us a fictional reminiscence about regular folks in the little town of Black Oak, not far from Jonesboro, Ark., where the author was born. Got to appreciate Grisham's desire to write a book where there's not a single lawyer, dead or alive, and no judges, trials, courtrooms, conspiracies or nagging social issues. Rich and famous - those legal thrillers like ''The Pelican Brief'' and ''The Brethren.'' Any formula, even the most successful, can feel like a trap after a while. Maybe a little too good for the books that have made him Ohn Grisham is about as good a storyteller as we've got in the United States these days. John Grisham's novel centers on a young boy in a small Arkansas town.

John grisham a painted house summary