Eric Bar-Chen

If you have got used to Grisham's courthouse novels then you're in for a pleasant surprise here. "A painted house" is set in the early 50's of the 20th century and is told through the eyes of a 7 year old boy growing up in the cotton producing areas of Arkansas. It is a masterpiece of a period novel, and makes the reader feel that he is living the experience himself. Grisham proves yet again how talented a storyteller he is. You won't want to put this book down. Buy it, read it, live the experience. You won't regret it.

Untalented author who churns out rubbish for the masses. No wonder she's written so many books, they probably only take a few days to write. If you are a discerning reader avoid this book. I made it through the 1st 30 pages before giving up. Don't be fooled by the "New York Times bestseller" tag that goes with it.

What a lot of rubbish. Managed to make it through 20 pages before giving up. Not even good enough to read on a plane trip and leave on the seat for someone else. Look elsewhere for literary enjoyment.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Harris echoes my views almost entirely and this ought to have been a book suitable for mass distribution to the uninformed and brainwashed population of religious believers. However, unfortunately, his intellectual, high-brow style of writing precludes this sort of wider reading audience, who undoubtedly will not have the patience to look up obtuse words in a dictionary every few sentences. Indeed, I am not sure that the author did not make wide use of a dictionary himself in order to locate every unknown term in the English language. The fact that half the book is made up of notes, forcing the reader to go back and forth between the text and the explanations doesn't help either. To conclude, this important book misses its mark by a long way in that the average reader will not understand half of what he reads. Instead of being a source of information the book becomes a test as to the readers knowledge of the English language and tests the patience of all but the most persevering, and that is a shame.