A Painted House

Usually I put John Grisham in my list of paper(-back) tigers, the kind of books you take on airplanes or trains and don't really mind if you lose them during the course of the journey. But reading A Painted House changed all my perceptions of Mr.Grisham. It was simple language, a paperback with none of the pretentions of 'world class writers', but this one was definitely not use and throw, it was a keeper.

This led me to the video movie made for Hallmark channel and I can truly say the movie did not disappoint me at all, unlike many other book-turned-into-movie stuff. It is the story of a boy growing up in the cotton country of the American South at the fag end of WW2. If you want to know a thing or two about rural American culture of the forties and the fifties this is the movie, it is all the more entertaining because it is seen through the eyes of child. Cotton farmers steeped in debt, hill people(remember Beverly Hillbillies), Mexican who came every year from across the border in time of harvest, GM and Ford factories 'up North' - everyone represents the nation that once was US of A.