John Grisham‘s fame as the master of the legal thriller is well earned and no secret. However, in his novel A Painted House, Grisham displays his deep talent in a completely different setting and genre. Set on a family cotton farm in 1950s Arkansas, A Painted House is a story told from the point of view of a young boy working the family cotton farm with his Father, Grandfather and Mother. Grisham paints an astoundingly accurate picture of the social and economic realities of rural life and farming in the 1950s and blends that picture into a captivating story of the events a farming family experiences and endures during cotton harvest. Since the protagonist and narrator is a young boy, the reader is presented the story from a unique and refreshing perspective. In the space of a single growing season, Grisham creates a framework that will impact every character for the rest of their lives. From the struggle to borrow enough money to put in the cotton crop to the endless hours of walking the fields searching for weeds to chop to the back-breaking race to hand-pick the cotton before the rains and floods ruin the crop, Grisham‘s A Painted House is an exciting and thought provoking novel.