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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: 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: 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: Too Bad
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.
Rating: 
Summary: I'm so glad I did
Review: When I saw that Melinda Haynes had come out with a new book, I almost didn't read it. I had tried reading Mother of Pearl and just couldn't get into it at the time. But I saw a copy of Chalktown at the library and decided (since it wouldn't cost anything) to give it a go. I am so glad I did. I was caught up in the story from the beginning and it was all I wanted to read. Even when I was doing other things, my mind kept wandering back to the book and I was itching to pick it back up. I found the writing to be harsh at one moment and then poetic in the next. I found myself wrapped up in several of the characters and couldn't wait to find out what would happen to them. When one thing happens towards the end (I won't say what), I actually yelled out "oh no"!! Now that I have caught on to Melinda Haynes style of writing and story telling, I am going to start reading Mother of Pearl again. I know I will be happy that I did.
Rating:
Summary: I'm so glad I did
Review: When I saw that Melinda Haynes had come out with a new book, I almost didn't read it. I had tried reading Mother of Pearl and just couldn't get into it at the time. But I saw a copy of Chalktown at the library and decided (since it wouldn't cost anything) to give it a go. I am so glad I did. I was caught up in the story from the beginning and it was all I wanted to read. Even when I was doing other things, my mind kept wandering back to the book and I was itching to pick it back up. I found the writing to be harsh at one moment and then poetic in the next. I found myself wrapped up in several of the characters and couldn't wait to find out what would happen to them. When one thing happens towards the end (I won't say what), I actually yelled out "oh no"!! Now that I have caught on to Melinda Haynes style of writing and story telling, I am going to start reading Mother of Pearl again. I know I will be happy that I did.
Rating:
Summary: read this one twice
Review: While a part of me wants to say that Melinda Haynes is traveling familiar territory with Chalktown (the inscrutable and savage God who rules in Flannery O'Connor's stories is also operating here), I also think she has something special of her own worth a second and deeper look. What that is, is her total success in getting you inside the heads of people who are desperately and permanently poor in worldly goods, in mental acquirements, and somehow still richly endowed with the spirit. O'Connor shows you the thought processes of such people, but she doesn't really MAKE you identify with them. Haynes doesn't exhibit that quality of totally detached observation of her characters, she makes you get into their hearts rather than just observe their thoughts. And what thoughts! It's as though through the filter of ignorance, trashiness, desperate conditions, incurable ills, and the unfairly imposed burdens of bigotry, God can only be known in his most extreme and wierd manifestations--yet he CAN be known. Christ shows up here as a healer who is also an adulterer and a criminal, as a profoundly abused child, as his barely literate but compassionate brother, as an artist whose canvas is the inside of his house, as a man with a ravaged face and a ravishing garden. And the Holy Spirit invades the story, as impossible hope for what we wish were possible, as realized healing that no one would wish on his worst enemy, as revelatory dreams of forgiveness for what was never really a crime. All of these manifestations are bracketed between two most interesting characters. The first, Marion Ulysses Calhoun, is a black man who has all the civilized virtues and rationality for which his white neighbors go lacking. He is kind, frugal, a careful farmer and a fine steward of his home and his tractor, and a good father to the neglected Hezekiah and Yellababy. He gives us a civilized place to stand in all the craziness, and he sees God as mysterious, but liking a good joke same as everybody. At the other end of the spectrum is Susan-Blair, a woman who has been 'saved' from her drinking, but has been soured in the saving into a viciously uncaring and abusive mother inundated in the borrowed offscourings of other peoples lives. The nasty geese, with their necks snaking together 'like Medusa's locks' that inhabit her yard are the outward and visible sign of her spiritually wasted soul--she has literally turned her youngest child to stone. There are some untidy loose ends in the book (why did that preacher wind up in jail?), some disconcerting time jumps that could have been smoother, and some overwriting--three similes a sentence is sometimes too much. But I thought it was a great story for all that. I'll be reading it again, and for me, that's a test of whether I thought the author has something to offer beyond a page-turning plot.
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