Kirkus
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Newcomer Haynes writes swaying, shaded sentences in a promising debut that nicely realizes the atmosphere of Pearl, Mississippi, in the 1950s but that lacks an emotional decisiveness able to justify its prodigious length. What immediately strikes the reader is Haynes's style: grainy, rhythmic sentences whose music sometimes needs to be read aloud. As style, her prose is often beautiful and full of grace, but as communication it can be confusing, especially because one of the writer's narrative habits is to plop the reader down in the aftermath of an undescribed event and then describe it pages later. The story opens this way, and violently. A bottle is thrown at Canaan's head and he bleeds his way home. That incident sets the tone for the tale's other, mostly harmless oddities and personalities: Judy Tucson/Two Sun, who lives down by the river with sticks in her hair, issuing predictions given to her by the moon; lesbians Bea and Neva, guardians of Valuable, a motherless 15-year-old girl who furtively writes poetry and aches for companionship and love; Even Grade, a lonely young black man who falls in love with Judy; Jackson, a white boy who impregnates Valuable and leaves town; and Canaan himself, an elderly and sage janitor who reads Aeschylus and is composing a treatise on 'The Reality of the Negro.' Haynes's first is what might be called an 'atmospheric' novel: curiosities of dialect and strange usages richly evoke a Mississippi town. The plot itself'a simple affair in which Valuable dies during childbirth, followed by subsequent reconciliations among the story's participants'is a thin string along which Haynes drapes her alluring language and sensibility. Few of the characters, though, achieve permanence in the reader's memory. What lingers are moments, sayings, and the marvelous descriptions of sights and sounds in Pearl.