CHALKTOWN (Summer 2001)

The premise of a sleepy Southern town whose inhabitants communicate by writing messages on chalkboards hints at lovely gothic strangeness; the characters who visit that town -- a young truant boy and his learning-disabled brother -- seem picked from delightful, eccentric Southern central casting. But Haynes' whimsical idea doesn't hold up for long, despite some graceful turns of phrase. It's a slippery slope from weird-and-wonderful to cliched-and-annoying, and one that the author -- whose first novel, Mother of Pearl, was an Oprah pick -- sadly plunges down.