You Know Better: A Novel

by Tina McElroy Ansa

Hardcover, 2002

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Collection

Publication

William Morrow (2002), Edition: 1st, Hardcover, 336 pages

Description

As the tiny town of Mulberry, Georgia, celebrates its spring Peach Blossom Festival, things are far from peachy for three generations of Pines women. Eighteen-year-old LaShawndra, who wants nothing more out of life than to dance in a music video, has messed up again -- but this time she isn't sticking around to hear about it. Not that her mother seems to care: Sandra is too busy working on her career and romancing a local minister to notice. It's LaShawndra’s grandmother Lily Paine Pines who is out scouring the streets at midnight looking for her granddaughter. But Lily discovers she is not alone. A ghost of a well-known Mulberry pioneer is coming out of the shadows. Over the course of one weekend, these three disparate women, guided by the wisdom of three unexpected spirits, will learn to face the pain of their lives and discover that with reconciliation comes the healing they all desperately seek. You Know Better brilliantly portrays the fissures in modern African American family life to reveal the indestructible soul that bonds us all.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Shutzie27
Having read "The Hand I Fan With," I was certain this book would be just as wonderful.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. For whatever reason, it came across as preachy, tedious and cardboard, three things I wouldn't have even expected the author capable of. The three women (and the ghosts who guide them)
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somehow don't ever really seem like anything other than character templates, rather than fully-formed women (a strength of Ansa's is her previous books).

It just felt rushed.
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Physical description

336 p.; 8.3 inches

ISBN

006019779X / 9780060197797
Page: 0.4426 seconds