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John Grisham's "The Painted House" is admittedly inspired from his childhood growing up in rural Arkansas and by all indications is a clear diversion from his formula lawyer thrillers that have brought him fame and made his name a household word. However, this novel is not that far a divergence from his renown formulated style.

Grisham's novel is a coming of age tale set in 1952, "when the Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers, with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless" (Grisham 1). The protagonist is seven-year-old Luke Chandler who lives with his grandparents and parents on a rented cotton farm in Arkansas delta. The story starts off with Luke overhearing his father and grandfather whispering that it could be a good crop, "words that were seldom heard" in this household, but the cotton this year was over Luke's head and waist high to his father (Grisham 1).

The family has experienced a roller coaster of luck, with perhaps more downs than ups. And farm life have kept the men from seeking their own passions in life, such as Luke's grandfather, who had been offered to play professional baseball, but was needed on the farm when his father died. Thus, listening to the St. Louis Cardinals had become a family ritual, a religion actually, and Luke had his own aspirations to become a ball player.

To help with the harvest the Chandlers hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks and for weeks they pick cotton in the heat and rain, fighting off fatigue and trying not to kill each other in the process. During these weeks, little Luke is exposed to things that most boys his age would never encounter. More than once he is placed between a rock and a hard place and forced to keep secrets that threaten his life and life of his family.

Luke is not only the protagonist, but is the narrator as well and so the reader is seeing this Eisenhower era world of rural Arkansas through the eyes of a seven-year-old. Living in a world of grown-ups leaves him ready to become on himself, however, at the same time he wants to stay in his childhood world, the dilemma every child faces. As the weeks go by, Luke volleys between his fantasy of playing for the Cardinals and the realities of family and farm life, including all the personalities and hierarchy of the hired hands.

A teenage girl from the hill family gives Luke his first exposure to sex, the sight of a naked female body, which convinces him that he has indeed grown up and is no longer a mere child but definitely on his way to becoming a man. He is also exposed to other events during this cotton season, including a murder, that peels away the layers of skin of childhood innocence and forces him to make choices that are difficult enough for adults, much less a seven-year-old. Luke also watches his family grow when their opinions of people they had once felt disdain towards changes as situations and circumstance leads them to a change of heart and attitude.

Although Grisham's gives the narration of the story to a seven-year-old, Luke presents it as an adult and though it is quite charming and touching to witness the family's daily plight, there is something about it that calls to mind hokey and contrived.