Rating: 
Summary: Chalktown should be erased
Review: Hmmm...I don't think these other reviewers are particularly judicious in throwing their stars around. I thought Mother of Pearl was a good book, but Chalktown was a weak follow-up. Some real sloppy moments of prose, not enough character development, and a rather ridiculous premise that Haynes was unable to make work.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Read!!
Review: I found Chalktown to be one of the most riviting books I have read. You can feel her characters they are so vivid. I read Mother Of Pearl, which is such a favorite that I have the hardcover, softcover, CD and audio and knew Ms Haynes was the best of the best authors. I am anxious for her next book.
Rating:
Summary: I think I live in Chalktown
Review: I got Chalktown on Holy Saturday afternoon. I started reading it on the hour drive for Easter Vigil with my mother. I read aloud to my wife as we drove; the pacing nicely suited to my voice, though totally out of sync with the potholes. I reached the spot where Marion realizes that a body can't ever leave a place just as the light got too bad to read on. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting in the near dark waiting for the lighting of the Pascal Candle and seeing things in St. John's that haven't been there in up to 50 years. The stations that were once painted plaster instead of the current brass rectangles, and the floor grate where this altar boy had to kneel while we paused for readings, and people gone and dead. Marion's discovery engraved itself on my lower bifocals; I had never left that church where I was first communioned the spring before Mike K** was run down and I made my first funeral, where I was confirmed, and somehow, with my 86-year-old mother, I am still there in the improbable year of 2001. Reading, for me , involves as much creativity as writing, and I have been extremely creative with Chalktown, but it has taxed my imagination to keep up with Haynes. I took two shortcuts I hope I shall be forgiven for. The preacher and Susan-Blair became the Robert Mitchum and Shelly Winters characters from the movie Night of the Hunter. "Suffer little children to come unto me," keeps popping though my head, and I keep seeing her George County in terms of the harsh black and white cinematography of that movie, even though the words are a Jackson Pollock profusion of chromatics. (Maybe that is the wrong painter, Aaron's face made me think of the face in Munch's Scream). I also had this uncomfortable feeling that she was holding a mirror in front of me. Especially when she mentioned that the guy I keep trying not to identify with had named his bus the Blue Goose, one of my old CB handles. And I was 16 in 1961 and Cathy's real name was Becky. I rode her time machine into a world I find almost as hard to understand as reality. And as with Mother of Pearl, I find myself wanting to ask a thousand questions. Since she isn't here, I have to answer them for myself. I like my answers, but someday I want to ask the author. I hope the media professionals who pass imprimaturs on a book are supportive, but just reading from the way the publisher tried to pigeonhole Haynes on the dust jacket, I wonder. I know, I once compared her to Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. But that was because I wanted to set a measure of the artist as a new face. That art is now a given with Mother of Pearl. Wonder if critics will understand that, or in a failure of imagination put her in someone else's garden. Damn!!! All the above was written with 100 pages to go. Like commenting on Don Giovanni or Romeo and Juliet without the last act. With that ending, they ought to be comparing her to O. Henry. Before I got there the book had me crying and laughing, and living with those people. Melinda Haynes made me think. took me to some places I don't often visit. And by the way, chased me to my Atlas of Mississippi to look up the real George County, where I found Fig Farm Road.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Bad
Review: I was very disappointed in Melinda Haynes' second book. I started with great interest and enthusiasm, having found Mother of Pearl such a gem. The story has an interesting beginning, and I was intrigued by the characters- especially a young boy who is severly brain damaged and his brother. After a detailed introduction into this family, and all of its dynamics- the book suddenly shifts to fifteen years earlier. At this point the book looses all explaination. It becomes confusing and uninteresting. The characters lack depth- and there is a mystery that the reader should be interested in but isn't. I have been reading all summer and asking myself "why" with every page that I turn. I am looking at this novel as a short story- forgetting all but the first part of the book. Too bad to be so dissapointed after having been so thrilled by Mother of Pearl.
Rating:
Summary: Life Happens
Review: Melinda Haynes is a talented writer! In "Chalktown" she has managed to exceed the skills she demonstrated in her first novel, "Mother of Pearl." The author successfully describes a motley crew of characters with their problems, idiosyncrasies, faults, failings, strengths and charms. Haynes vividly describes grinding poverty, lack of education and racism. Hez, for example, is largely uneducated. His preference is to skip as many school days as is allowable by the educational system. Yet, for his apparent lack of smarts and social skills, he has heroic qualities. A neglectful family, that can hardly be called a family at all, makes his caring and protectiveness of Yellababy his impaired brother, all the more difficult. Fairy, the ostensible family head, spends more time with his former wife than with his present wife and children. Wife and mother, Susan-Blair, has struggled with alcohol and her main means of survival seems to be her failed entrepreneurial efforts with a consignment business. The family's one daughter is an on-again, off-again runaway who is headed for trouble because of her clandestine relationship with a mysterious county worker. The characters are well drawn with all main characters having vivid personalities, quirks or charms. Each chapter is short and seems to tease and urge the reader on to find out why "Chalktown" is so odd. Why do folk only correspond via chalk and chalkboard? Why are they so bound together even though some obviously harbor feelings of suspicion and hatred toward one another? AND, who (really) dunnit? Even the ending is a surprise. A fine read!
Rating:
Summary: Terse communications on a town chalkboard hide a mystery.
Review: Melinda Haynes is a talented writer! In "Chalktown" she has managed to exceed the skills she demonstrated in her first novel, "Mother of Pearl." The author successfully describes a motley crew of characters with their problems, idiosyncrasies, faults, failings, strengths and charms. Haynes vividly describes grinding poverty, lack of education and racism. Hez, for example, is largely uneducated. His preference is to skip as many school days as is allowable by the educational system. Yet, for his apparent lack of smarts and social skills, he has heroic qualities. A neglectful family, that can hardly be called a family at all, makes his caring and protectiveness of Yellababy his impaired brother, all the more difficult. Fairy, the ostensible family head, spends more time with his former wife than with his present wife and children. Wife and mother, Susan-Blair, has struggled with alcohol and her main means of survival seems to be her failed entrepreneurial efforts with a consignment business. The family's one daughter is an on-again, off-again runaway who is headed for trouble because of her clandestine relationship with a mysterious county worker. The characters are well drawn with all main characters having vivid personalities, quirks or charms. Each chapter is short and seems to tease and urge the reader on to find out why "Chalktown" is so odd. Why do folk only correspond via chalk and chalkboard? Why are they so bound together even though some obviously harbor feelings of suspicion and hatred toward one another? AND, who (really) dunnit? Even the ending is a surprise. A fine read!
Rating:
Summary: Life Happens
Review: Melinda Haynes' new book, Chalktown, fulfills the promise I thought I saw in her first book, the Oprah selection Mother of Pearl: This woman will write a notable literary work. Taking nothing away from Mother of Pearl, which introduced us to Ms. Haynes' ability to lay words before us that freshened our perceptions, Chalktown moves into the realm of allegory with its allusive action, its revelations of what is really important about living, and its unsentimental portrayal of human frailty. If one expects "the usual" from this book, one will be disappointed. The neat solutions and straw figure characters of most current fiction are not here. Chalktown is no quick read, for one finds oneself stopping to allow oneself the satisfying practice of divergent thinking. The characters and plotlines are not closed loops; the reader finds multiple routes to interpretation and sighs over the surfeit of Ms. Haynes language as well.
Rating:
Summary: Blackboard Jungle, Backwoods Style
Review: On a hot summer morning in the Mississippi backwoods, sixteen-year-old Hezekiah straps his mentally retarded younger brother Yellababy to his back and heads out to Chalktown, even though he's been warned about how strange the small village down road is. Because of the unsolved murder in 1955 of one of their neighbors, Chalktown's other three residents are highly suspicious of each other and they don't talk among themselves. When they have to communicate, they write on blackboards propped up in front of their houses and the rest of the world stays away. Haynes explores people and situations in a part of the world many of us know nothing about and would probably tend to ignore if we did. She draws us in with excellent characterization and description so good it'll make you cry. This is a five star book everybody should read. Review submitted by Captain Katie Osborne
Rating: 
Summary: a good read ... but .....
Review: Sorry not to be ovely entusiastic about this one but it'd be hard for anyone to follow up Mother of Pearl. There's an over-all darkness to this work that takes away some of the fun of reading it. Before I got too far into it, I caught myself wondering why all the poor, uneducated people could articulate things so colorfully and poetically in their thoughts. Realizing that wasn't a very Southern attribute (Alabama native speaking) I let it go to literary device. The story is great and a couple and the characters are your best friends when you're finished. I hope the next work is just a tad more upbeat....
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: The South is known for its incredible women writers - and now, with the publication of Mother of Pearl and Chalktown, Melinda Haynes can be added to that list. Melinda Haynes shouts from the top of a Southern pine with a voice that can, by God, break glass. I've never read anything like Chalktown in my life! I was completely willing to follow Hez and Yallababy to the end of the earth. I can't fathom where in the world Melinda came up with that plot! Chalktown is mysterious, bewildering and surprising. It is also gorgeously written and lavished with the tangled oddities that make the South the South.
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