Tina McElroy Ansa

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.

In The Hand I Fan With, Ansa returns to the fictional small town of Mulberry, Georgia, where her previous two bestselling novels, Baby of the Family and Ugly Ways, were set. Filled with eccentric and terminally nosy folks, Mulberry is a vibrant community whose leading citizen is the extraordinary Lena McPherson. With the death of Lena's parents in a plane crash ten years earlier, she has become the one on whom everyone in Mulberry depends - she's the hand they fan with. Now forty-five, Lena's beginning to weary of shouldering everyone's problems. And her material wealth gives her no emotional sustenance. Desperate for love and companionship, she and a friend perform a supernatural ritual to conjure up a man for Lena. She gets one all right: a ghost named Herman who, though dead for one hundred years, is all man. His love changes Lena's life forever, satisfying as never before her physical and spiritual needs.

Three sexy, screwed-up Southern sisters come home to Mulberry to put their totally self-centered mother, Mudear, in her grave. We meet the Lovejoy women as they gather in their mother's house to lay her and the demons she has dumped on them to rest. Mudear Lovejoy was the kind of mother who ruled her house and raised her daughters with an iron hand even after her "change". Betty is her oldest daughter, big-boned and strong, the only one who remembers what Mudear was like before The Change. Emily is the middle child, restless and divorced, the one who every one assumed would be the first after Mudear to crack. The youngest is wild Annie Ruth, a TV anchorwoman who is pregnant out of wedlock and plagued by visions of menacing cats. Ernest, their father, is a kaolin mine worker who is so overwhelmed by all the females around him that sometimes he just wants to yell out, "Womens taking over my house!" As the sisters reminisce, they are unaware that even though Mudear's body is laid out in Parkinson Funeral Home, she is not so easily buried. Her spirit refuses to die, and she floats around Mulberry, watching her daughters stretched out on her porch smoking cigarettes, drinking her husband's liquor from her best glasses, and talking about marijuana like "some damn black girl hippies". In alternating voices, each member of the Lovejoy family tells us what preys on his or her mind. As they prepare for the memorial, sit up with the body, and at the funeral itself, each must come to grips with her relationship to Mudear. At the same time, each must define what a mother, a black mother - their mother - is.

Born in 1949 in a private blacks-only hospital in rural Georgia, Lena is the third child and longed-for first daughter of Nellie and Jonah, who own the local bar and liquor store. Considered "special" because she was born with a caul, believed to bestow sight into the future, Lena learns as a toddler that her special powers have more to do with the past: she can see and talk with ghosts. Despite her extraordinary talent, Lena is most memorable for the ordinariness of her everyday life: her first friendships, her years at school, her observations of her parents' sometimes stormy relationship, her grief at her grandmother's death.