Painted House / John Grisham 388 p.

Luke Chandler, age 7, tells of his life on cotton farm in rural Arkansas in the 1950’s where his parents and his grandparents struggle to harvest the cotton and to scrape a living from the farm. They hire Mexicans and hill people to pick the cotton. For six weeks, they pick cotton in the heat and the rain. Luke sees and hears of things 7-year olds don’t need to see…a man beaten to death, then another murder, birth of a child. He continues the house painting started by a hill people’s son. With the flood, the lowland cotton is destroyed. The story ends with Luke’s parents decide to move to the city to work in a factory.
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