This is certainly a different book in this series. For one thing there is no Ruby Wilcox, and I for one really missed her, as well as other eccentric citizens of Pecan Springs. It was interesting to look back at China's early life, and the mysitical theme was actually quite well done. This wasn't a mystery though in the true sense of the word. It's more a search for the past in China's mother's family. I still enjoyed the book, but I do want to get back to the main storyline in the next book in the series. We also see China getting softer and more feminine in each book. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I hope she doesn't get too soft since her toughness is part of the appeal of this series.

China Bayles is a self made independent woman who turned her back on her mother's Mississippi family because she refused to conform to the old South's vision of how a woman should behave. She lives in Pecan Springs, Texas with her husband and stepson. She proudly owns the Thyme and Sears herb shop and is co-owner of Thyme for Tea teashop. She has no plans to return to the family plantation of Jordan's Crossing until her mother calls her because she needs her help.

When China arrives at the old homestead, she learns that her great-aunt Tullie, a victim of Huntington's Disease, has struck down the plantation manager in a pique of anger. China's mother argues with her daughter that the irate manager walked out of the house enraged, but he has since disappeared. The police want to question Tullie about the spat. As China struggles to balance family loyalty with her legal responsibilities, she unearths secrets that should stay buried in the land that created them.

This is a different China Bayles unlike the one readers have come to know and love. The audience sees her as a true daughter of the south, fully cognizant of the rules, expectations and ties that bind her to a place she no longer can call home but has a hold on her loyalties. There are mysteries aplenty in BLOODROOT, some of them of the otherworldly kind. The author allows us to see, through the fist person narrative, how a Southern woman copes with her environment. This is a wonderful reading experience.

Harriet Klausner

Sometimes people panic when an author departs from the setting of an established series. In some cases it does affect the series negatively. This is NOT the case, however, in the latest China Bayles mystery. China is a strong enough character to hold her own when the secondary characters are not present. I found this book to be fascinating. The subplots were interesting and the characters were well-defined and credible. The author presented a family tree at the beginning, so it was not confusing keeping the family members straight. It was good for China to get away from Pecan Springs and interact with her mother more. This book could be read and enjoyed by those who have never read any others in the series. It's an excellent story.

I thought this book wasn't bad, but I felt like I was being rushed at the end, like K.E.W. ran out of ideas and had to end the book quickly. It left me thoroughly confused. If anyone GETS this book and wants to enlighten me, let me know. E-mail me at sweets_234@hotmail.com. Yes, I was serious, very serious. I don't understand it all. Grrr. Other than that little detail, I really enjoyed everything execpt the end. The writing, as usual, was surperb, and the love scenes were great. The thing about Ashton is that he is the only male K.E.W. character in all of the books I have read that doesn't force the female character into doing something she doesn't want to. In fact, he tells her that a simple "no" will do. Hee Hee. I still dunno if he is my favorite. Ruark from "Shanna" was pretty cool. :) Anywho, all in all, it wasn't such a bad book. But, compared to "Shanna" and "A Rose in Winter" it didn't stand a chance.
~Olivia~

When Ashton Wingate, much sought after plantation owner, is married, he believes it to be for life. Fate conspires against Ashton and his lovely wife Lierin though, as Lierin gets killed on their honeymoon. Three years later Ashton is still grieving after his beloved. On his way home one night, though, his driver hits a woman that looks strikingly like Lierin. Only one thing is lacking to this fairy-tale ending, though. The woman whom Ashton claims as his wife has lost her memory. She doesn't remember Ashton or their love for each other. Is she truly Ashton's wife or someone else's all together? You'll love this book. My copy is currently falling apart and dog-eared from the many times I have re-read it. Do yourself a favor and read this book.

Ashton Wingate, handsome plantation owner and grieving widower, is still haunted by the death of his beloved wife some three years ago. Imagine his shock, when a woman strikingly like his wife is hit by Ashton's carriage on his way home! Only one thing lies in the way of Ashton proving to everyone that this is actually his dear wife Lierin-she's lost her memory. But who is she? Is she Ashton's wife, or the wife of someone entirely different? This book is a definite must-read with finely drawn characters on many complex levels.

I won't bother providing an overview of the book. You can get that from the jacket or other reviews found on Amazon.

I am a very picky reader and don't like to waste my time with bad literature. With this in mind, I felt this book started very slow and at a couple of points, I nearly put it down. Fortunately, I stuck with it and the suspense and tension in the story built like a freight train moving out of a rail yard. Once the book hit full speed, I didn't want to put it down. I literally hid it under stuff and hunched my shoulders to sneak in a little more reading while at work. When I finished the book, I was disappointed that the story was over.

This was the first Deutermann novel I read, but a day after finishing this one, I went right back to the library to get another. Look for my review of "Hunting Season" in the not-too-distant future.

From the first chapter, which deals with more detail than anyone should need to know about blowing up a bridge to the last climactic confrontation, this novel literally moves with the speed of a trainwreck. The identity of the terrorism as revenge culprit is well hidden and is not revealed until the final third of the book. The elements of political intrigue within the FBI, gender equity, and animosities between federal agents and local law enforcement personnel are woven together in what is a very interesting and highly entertaining story.

TRAIN MAN is one of those books that I couldn't put down, and which caused my wife some exasperation. ("Are you reading again?! Which do you love more - me or that book?") Uh, sorry ... what did you say, dear?

This thriller by P.T. Deutermann is really two storylines in one, coming together only at the end. Each has its own protagonist and its own nutcase Bad Guy.

The primary plot has the TRAIN MAN blowing up railroad river bridges in retaliation for a past personal tragedy. The Good Guy on his trail is FBI Acting Assistant Director William "Hush" Hanson, who departs the Machiavellian atmosphere of the FBI's Washington headquarters for the field to run his quarry to ground. However, even out in the sticks, Hush isn't safe from the backstabbing and internecine warfare back at the Big House as spans continue to drop into the water. And what sort of game is Senior Agent Carolyn Lang, Hanson's assigned deputy for the manhunt, playing? Is that a treacherous blade in her belt, or just a friendly nail file?

The other wacko is US Army Colonel Mehle, down from the Pentagon and the National Security Council with explicit, no-nonsense orders to transport some captured Russian torpedoes with nuclear warheads from the Anniston Army Weapons Depot in Alabama to the Army's destruction facility in Tooele, Utah. The warheads need to go Right Now On The Double because they're leaking radiation, and the mode of transport is to be an Army train also taking chemical weapons to Utah for disposal. Top Brass pressure has made Mehle a bullet or two short of a full clip, so when the colonel decides to go along for the ride as the train's Full Throttle commander, Major Tom Matthews, the train's reluctant Security Officer, fears a bumpy ride and an inglorious end to his previously unblemished 20-year career.

Oh, and have I mentioned that the Train Man's targets are the bridges over the lower Mississippi River, that part of the waterway smack in the path between Alabama and Utah? Can you see where this is going?

Both plots are taut, suspenseful and finely paced, and the characters well drawn and believable. The identity of the TRAIN MAN comes as a surprise, though perhaps the revelation occurs too soon. Moreover, the author apparently researched America's rail system extensively, so the technical backdrop against which the action unfolds is very absorbing, especially if the reader has no prior knowledge of the subject. The novel's jacket compares it favorably to THE DAY OF THE JACKAL. I agree. This is quality reading entertainment.

Chasin' That Devil Music is definitely not a very cohesive work. It is a series of articles by Blues scholar Gayle Dean Wardlow detailing the lives of and searches for early Delta Bluesmen. The parts about Charley Patton are especially interesting, with insights to other parts of his life besides his singing career. He also puts the spotlight on some forgotten giants of the Delta Blues, like Ishmon Bracey, one of the first recorded Blues artists. A CD with some rare recordings and interviews with these legends and their associates is included. While this is a fascinating book, I would not recommend it to anyone who is not a Blues fan.

This book is a reprint of a collection of articles written by blues scholar Gayle Dean Wardlow. The collection contains interviews of blues musicians who helped shaped today's blues music and people who knew artists that no longer lived. The book also contains a CD of rare delta blues recordings made by the artists covered in this book.

This book IS a reprint of previously published articles, not all of them written by Wardlow (for instance, an interview with Wardlow by other reporters is included), but apparently most of these articles have never appeared in book form. They are fascinating for a reader interested in learning more about how people like Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, long dead, are more celebrated today than would have been imaginable, let alone possible, in their own times. Wardlow was one of the early "investigators" who unearthed obscure recordings and salient information about the musicians who made them. This book is largely an account of that difficult process. Now, when it's relatively easy to hear the complete recorded works of Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, et. al., it's hard to imagine what blues fans had to go through to hear this music 40 years ago. Wardlow's book is a revelation and an inspiration also. The "free" CD is wonderful, too, and worth the price of the book itself.

Life in Indianola, Mississippi, has some rough edges. In this earthy novel of Ned Rose and his sister Daze, the reader learns what it's like to grow up as a poor white in a state which is both class and color conscious. Ned works as an oxygen man who checks the oxygen level in the catfish ponds of Mack Bell, while his sister is employed as a bartender at the Beer Smith Lounge. There are glimpses of the sibling's often-absent, beer-in-hand parents, Ned's macho high school football buddies, and the gritty, more well-to-do employers of the common black and white folks.

This is an unsettling story which gets down and dirty right from the start. It's not a pleasant book nor one for the lighthearted. There's a strange uneasiness about it. You'll hope for the best as you read, all the while expecting the worst. The very real characters are not people you'd like to know. But the author, in a surprisingly good first novel, gets you deeply involved in their feelings of scorn. If you like the creepy characters in Pete Dexter's The Paper Boy, Ruth Hamilton's The Book of Ruth, or James Dickey's Deliverance, you'll like this book. The chapters are short and interesting. It's a book that's easy to read in short spurts, pick up and put down at any time, and the appeal is always there.

Just finished reading this book--couldn't put it down. An intriguing story, strongly drawn characters, and lively language. If this is Yarbrough's first novel, I'm waiting for more.

The Oxygen Man is quite simply a wonderful novel. The writing is clear, vibrant, and imbued with the emotions of the story -- it carries the story like music carries lyrics. The characters are real, empathetic (even the worst of them), fallable and adeptly rendered. And it reminds us that the struggles of being Southern (and human) are more complex than we think, that it is hard to escape the life you were born into, and even harder to escape the life you've lived, but the struggle is wortwhile, and that a world seeming to lack light or love and contain only danger, can really have those things. A book anyone who cares about fiction should read.

This is a story about a young woman who is determined to do the right thing. It takes place during the 60's in Persia, Mississippi and captures the feelings of that particular time -- specifically racism, ignorance, and people uncomfortable with the idea of change. It is about murder, violence, betrayal, innocence lost, and ultimately redemption.

I felt for Fannie's situation throughout this book. It pained me when the people of her community shunned her, and I was grateful she used her culinary talents as an outlet from their ugliness. Also, the friendship between Mattie and Frannie was depicted so well -- it perfectly captured the underlying tension present in their interactions with one another.

I cannot help but think of Harper Lee's, "To Kill A Mockingbird," after reading this book. Like it, "The Persia Cafe," is a fascinating glimpse into a time and place I know little about. And, both tell the story about the sacrifices we sometimes must make in order to do the right thing.

What is it about the South that evokes such powerful stories? Melany Neilson is a very talented writer, but I think even she would have to admit that living in the South offers so much to authors, that all they have to do is pay attention. Although Persia, Mississippi is fictional, it really isn't. It is every small town in Mississippi that I have ever been through. Having lived in Mississippi all my life, Persia just makes sense. I know those people. I have been in that cafe. I have stood on the banks of that river. And although I think that many things have changed for the better, I have also seen those looks on faces, both white and black. I have, at times, sensed the tension and distrust among people who have shared this geography for years and years.

The wonderful thing about this novel, however, is that the reader doesn't have to be from The South to appreciate the rich language and beautiful images. You can smell the fried chicken and biscuits whether you're in Jackson, Mississippi or Jackson Hole, Wyoming. You care about these people, wherever you happen to fall in relation to the Mason-Dixon line.

I love Southern writers. I think that they are special, and offer something to the world of literature that nobody else can. Hats off to Melany Neilson. You were fair, and honest, and respectful in your attempt.

Eudora Welty was right when she said Melany Neilson's writing is a cause for exhiliration. The Persia Cafe is a literary thriller! It is an exciting murder mystery and much more. Melany Neilson has painted a wonderful portrait of life--the sights, sounds, smells and tastes--in small town Mississippi in the early 1960s. But, most of all, The Persia Cafe is the story of an unlikely friendship. You will care about Fannie and Mattie. You won't want to put the book down until you find out what happens to them and to their friendship.

This book seems out of place in the "disaster book" genre. The author seems more concerned with reliving her childhood. Not a very good read.

I found this book to be fascinating as well as compelling. As a survivor of a terrible tornado that hit Wichita Falls, Texas in 1979, I could relate with the author's quest to find out how the Jackson, Mississippi tornado had impacted the lives of the survivors there. Lorian Hemingway has done a terrific job of presenting a painful subject with grace and compassion.

I would like to make two comments about this book. Most important, it is powerful, beautiful, and interesting, and is a great example of literary reporting, as well as memoir.
My second comment is to express my anger at the amazingly ill-informed and inaccurate comments made by "a reader from Arlington, Virginia," who saw fit to give the lowest rating possible to a book that, by all appearances, he or she has not even read. The comment that it is "poorly researched" could not be further from the truth, and his condescending suggestion that the author should have made use of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History makes him look like a fool, since that institution was cited as a source of information, as was the Eudora Welty Library. The reviewer is right that the town of "Byram" is not spelled correctly, though his argument is rather deflated in light of the fact that he cannot correctly spell the word "rectified" himself. There are many Jackson natives that would take issue with his assertion that there is not a single live oak tree in Jackson. One of the most amazingly ignorant "criticisms" is that "there were very few eyewitness interviews in the book"-----There were more than twenty. Even more outrageous is the claim that there is "very little on the impact the event had upon the community of South Jackson." (sic)
In reality, this impact is the subject of the ENTIRE BOOK.
It's unfortunate that this person's careless reading was translated into a review. Listen instead to The New York Times, which praised A World Turned Over and called it "lush" and "evocative."

Set aboard a Mississippi side-wheel steamer in the 1850s, Melville's novel charts the progress of the American character at a time when the old frontier was giving way, albeit slowly, to a new, urban frontier.

"The Confidence-Man" works at so many different levels that it is no wonder Melville's readers weren't quite sure what to make of his ninth novel. It is a call-and-response of idealism suborned for the purposes of sheer humbuggery, material theft and moral sophistry.

I think readers would do well to always keep the word "confidence" in mind as they read the novel; it recurs time and again in different contexts throughout the book. Melville's purpose is to highlight the rift between what things seem to be and what they truly are. It is eerily existential in tone and readers familiar with Kierkegaard and Camus will be delighted by Melville's keen appreciation for the absurdity of the human condition.

The wretched reception of "The Confidence-Man" undermined what little was left of Melville's own self-confidence as a writer whose work could support his family. In one sense, this was a grievous shame, because Melville lived for nearly four more decades and, presumably, could have spent that time producing more great literature had his contemporaries simply recognized the intellectual genius of his work.

In another sense, though, "The Confidence-Man" is a fitting send-off to a literary career hobbled by critical inattention and plain bad luck. Melville's America is not an America where dreams come true (note how China Aster is destroyed by his) and where confidence -- optimism -- is rewarded or even warranted. Yet, it is an America recognizably closer to the one we live in than those crafted by Melville's contemporaries -- Emerson, Thoreau, Irving.

"The Confidence-Man" is a very complex novel of ideas. This particular edition is very useful because it provides fairly thorough annotation throughout the book. I would highly recommend it for use in a graduate course on American intellectual history, particularly juxtaposed against Emerson and Tocqueville's analyses of American society and culture.

With "The Confidence-Man," Melville offered a final novelistic expression of his hopes, doubts, and frustrations about the American nation on the verge of Civil War in the late 1850's.

Many critics and reviewers take a negative point of view on this novel, saying that the narrative instability and episodic nature of the novel represents Melville's anger with the increasingly poor reception of his later novels, including the brilliant "Moby-Dick".

Over the course of the novel's first half, we are presented with a string of characters who spout the virtues of charity and trust, all supposedly different manifestations of one Confidence-Man. The confidence-man engages passengers of the riverboat Fidele from St. Louis to New Orleans in philosophical, literary, personal, and business-related conversations. This is the heart of the novel, even in the second half, where only one confidence-man appears. As in Cervantes' "Don Quixote," you are able to tease out more about the ambiguous purposes of the novel through speeches rather than actions.

At points amusing, horrifying, and sad, "The Confidence-Man" is difficult, if not impossible to categorize in any simple fashion. An extremely worthwhile read, especially if you read it as a prophetic work of the American Civil War and try to figure out for yourself if Melville thought things would turn out alright, or if the US was due for an apocalyptic judgment.

Quite an Original

The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
I am specifically reviewing the Northwestern University Press edition of Melville's "The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade."

There is a Norton Critical Edition of this novel edited by Hershel Parker, but it doesn't seem to be offered by Amazon.com. It is offered at at W.W. Norton's website... The Hendricks House edition edited by Elizabeth Foster is another good edition, but it seems to be out of print at the moment.

On November 12, 1856 Herman Melville and Nathanial Hawthorne took a walk among the sandhills near Liverpool, England. They smoked cigars, and Hawthorne wrote about a week later that Melville spoke of Providence and futurity, and he, Melville, had pretty much made up his mind to be annilated.

"The Confidence-Man" is the last novel that Melville published during his lifetime. I agree with Newton Arvin, who called "The Confidence-Man" "one of the most infidel books ever written by an American; one of the most completely nihilistic, morally and metaphysically."

About 150 years after the book was first published, and about fifty since the book was first taken seriously by literary critics, The Confidence-Man is not a settled matter. In fact there remains excessive discord among readers and critics about the worth of this novel. Some compare it to Swift's "Tale of the Tub," others will tell you that this book is static and formless.

The idea is simple enough. On April 1 a devil in the guise of a deaf mute goes aboard a Mississippi river steamboat, and begs for charity. In rapid succession he transforms himself into a crippled Black man, a man with the weed, the man in the grey coat , the gentleman with the big book, the man with the plate and finally the Cosmopolitan. In these different guises he gulls and diddles people. He asks for trust. He is not always successful, but he can take solace in his failures. The reason for the devil's failures is the cyniscim, mistrust and mysandry of his marks. It is their human failings that accounts for his failures. And that's not so bad for the devil.

Melville's control of his material was never greater. I recommend the Northwestern Newberry edition because it contains draft fragments of chapter 14. You can see how carefullly Melville wrote this novel. The blandness of the prose is deliberate. If you read the surviving drafts you will see how Melville purposedly silenced and muted his message. Perhaps Melville was too successful for even close readers get lost sometimes.

At the end there is an increase of seriousness. An old man closes his Bible and asks for a life preserver. The Cosmopolitan hands the old man a chamberpot which appears to be full, and calls it a life preserver. The Cosmopolitan then extinguishes the lamp, and then leads the other into the darkness.

I could not identify with Raban's depiction of people. He is simply too smug and cynical, pointing out the pessimistic and gloomy side of people and places. I did not sense any credibility. Instead reading Old Glory was more like hearing the bloated stuff you expect to hear from someone after one too many pints.

The glory in Old Glory is only Raban's. There are times when you might think he's passing Cape Horn in a washtub. (How daring!) Or perhaps journeying into a Lost Land inhabited by a tribe of pathetically humble simpletons. (Oh, what a pain!) You don't have to be a careful reader to see through this unless, of course, you've lived apart from interesting human contact most of your life and never saw a river bigger than an ankle-deep stream ... wait a minute!...that is, unless you've lived in England most of your life, I suppose! So beware. This is a book of nice little stories and adventures, but resist the temptation to want to shoot the messenger this time. The Englishman might not know any better.

Old Glory tells the tale of Raban's solo journey by boat down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans. Along the way, he visits the great cities and backwater towns that dot this legendary American wonder. Raban demonstrates that the Mississippi is, in myriad ways, much more than a river. He records the life-altering relationships between people and place and brings us the history and experience of this ultimate American artery. I have crossed the Mississippi by bridge and plane countless times and, with a cursory glance, acknowledged it as a major American marker. Raban, however, brings a soul to the Mississippi that, at once, uncovers a latent reverence, inspires a profound understanding, and rekindles a vicarious sense of spirit and adventure in the American citizen for "our" river and it's lore. This is an excellent book that deserves, and will certainly earn, your attention.

I have traveled a fair amount through the small towns of the United States and have to concur with Mr. Raban's depiction of both the towns and the people who live in them. Other readers who have taken the time to write reviews of this book here seem to have remembered only about half of what Raban wrote about each of the towns that he visited.

His initial impressions were often filled with disappointment. He had approached this trip with a boyhood dream in his head and he was continually set back on his proverbial heels by the reality of these river towns in 1979. More often than not, however, further exploration of the town, conversations with some of its citizens and reflection on his part, caused Raban to revise his evaluation of many of the places that he visited.

Some reviewers may perhaps have forgotten that this book describes this region as it was after years during which the US economy struggled through an oil crisis, bouts of inflation, intervals of high unemployment and the tail end of the history of the "old economy". Should someone have the time and inclination to retrace Raban's steps nearly 25 years later, I would not be surprised if they found these towns and their people had changed quite a bit, probably for the better in social and economic terms. For instance, Raban devoted most of a chapter to the failed election campaign of Memphis's first black candidate for mayor. A quick Google (keywords: Memphis Tennesee government) will show you that the present mayor of Memphis (Willie W. Herenton) is African-American. I'm going to guess that he is not the first black mayor of Memphis.

I loved Raban's modus operandi for getting to the heart of a place. Tie up your boat, go to the nearest bar and strike up a conversation. This would seem to me to be the most reliable means to quickly get an unvarnished opinion about a place. Sure, someone on a bar stool is likely to have a slightly dimmer view of the place where he or she lives than the average citizen, but Raban was rarely, if ever, content with their views. He basically used the tavern-sitters as a 1979-era local flesh-and-blood Google; he found out the basics about a place like who are the local characters, what are the main industries, which are the burning local political issues etc. His fellow barflies were more important as sources of germane questions than as sources of definitive answers.

Raban's perspective on the St. Louis metropolitan area is one that I can vouch for personally, having visited there 10 years after he did. Furthermore Jonathan Franzen's novel The Twenty-seventh City is an elaborate description of the city-county socio-politico-economic tensions during the late 1980s. The continuum between Raban and Franzen's descriptions is pretty easy to imagine. Franzen grew up in the county and would have been a teen-ager when Raban was shacked up with his rich, wigged-out girlfriend out in Clayton.

I took one long journey through the US accompanied by a Danish friend. Upon learning that my traveling companion was a foreigner nearly every American that we encountered relaxed almost visibly and began to wax philosophical about the state of things. The radius of their sphere of interest varied, but everyone had an opinion about something. It was delightful to see that Mr. Raban experienced this same lowering of guard and move toward introspection as soon as he announced that he was an Englishman traveling in the US.

The parochial character and narrow-mindedness of many of the people he encountered matches up well with my own experiences in similar terrain four years after his journey. It is important to note though that Raban was treated to extraordinary amounts of generosity, both material and emotional, by the people that he met, however rhetorically bigoted they might have been. The author is at pains to acknowledge both the generosity and the puzzling disconnect that he sees between their rhetoric and their behavior.

Just one of the wonderful things that Jonathan Raban does in the course of Old Glory is show the reader the essence of American character. Their aggressive rhetoric is their shield against the unknown, but once you are brought in behind that shield, Americans are among the most outrageously generous and genuinely good people that you are likely to find.

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.

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.

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.