Why a Booktrail?
2000s: This story was inspired by John Grisham’s own childhood in rural Arkansas.
A Painted House
What you need to know before your trail
The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, 7, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that’s never been painted. The Chandlers need help on the farm and so they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it.
This is a heart-wrenching story of an impoverished farming community and a seven year old boy who hears things that he should not have had to.
Travel Guide
“Highway 135 ran straight and flat through the farm country of the Arkansas Delta. On both sides, as far as I could see, the fields were white with cotton”
The landscape in this part of the woods is unique and was beautifully evoked in this novel -harvest time and people who are brought in to work off the land brings together a range of people who work in this environment and the problems and worries that they bring with them
The cotton must be picked before Autumn arrives. The two groups don’t mix well and trouble ensues.
The sub plot involving the neighbouring family, the Latchers, who are dirt poor sharecroppers also brings to light the plight of such families as they struggle to live -hand to mouth much of the time and shows how their reliance on the land is complete.
Family and community are common threads which weave in and around the landscape as if they are part of it, which they are.
Streetview Maps
B) Arkansas - ‘Pappy decided that his truck would only make one run to Black Oak’
D) Arkansas - Eureka Springs Country
Where Next?
