Review: A Painted House


I finished reading A Painted House . Luke tells us the story of a rural farm life in Arkansas in early 50′s. Luke is a seven year old who lives on the family with his parents and grand parents. Baseball is his passion and he follows the cardinal games only from a single radio in the house. The dinner table conversations takes us into the family life in those days.

Luke’s family gets all of their vegetables from the garden. Luke’s mother helped create and maintain the garden. How nice if you can do this for real, I miss the taste of fresh vegetables that are grown in ones own garden without any pesticides. The family works on cotton fields and employs two different groups of people to help. One group is Mexicans who come from Mexico every cotton picking season. The other is hill people who live in Ozark mountains and come to farm.

Throughout the story the author gives a realistic description of many facets on farm life. Their single truck, the Sunday church, women gossip,dinner conversations, baseball. I thoroughly enjoyed these more than the story itself which ends with Luke going north with his parents

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