Introduction

Bestselling author Tina McElroy Ansa is back with another tale from Mulberry, Georgia, the richly drawn fictional town and home of the extraordinary Lena McPherson.  Lena, now forty-five and tired of being "the hand everyone fans with," has grown weary of shouldering the town's problems and wants to find a little love and companionship for herself.  So 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 full of life and all man.  His love changes Lena's life forever, satisfying as never before both her physical and spiritual needs.  Filled with the same "humor, grace, and great respect for power of the particular" (The New York Times Book Review) as her previous critically acclaimed novels, Baby of the Family and Ugly Ways, The Hand I Fan With  is yet another memorable and life-affirming tale from one of America's best-loved authors.

Editorial Review

This novel is a sequel to Tina McElroy Ansa's Baby of the Family, in which readers were introduced to her heroine, Lena McPherson. Lena was born with a caul over her face, a fold of skin that, according to the elderly of Mulberry, Georgia, promises good fortune. Indeed, Lena is blessed--and cursed--with the ability to read minds, a gift that has fueled her commercial prosperity and her numerous community projects but has also, she feels, stifled her romantic life. It's hard to fall in love with a man whose meanest thoughts are plain to you, Lena finds. The author's solution to Lena's dilemma is a ghost: Herman, who has been dead for a century but who still has "plenty of life in him." This unlikely coupling--and couple they do, overcoming the usual obstacles to human-astral intercourse--leads to a kind of happiness for Lena as McElroy explores her fictional Southern world.

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