Chalktown

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.