The Hand I Fan With - Hardcover

Ansa, Tina Mcelroy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385475993 ISBN 13: 9780385475990

Publisher: Doubleday, 1996

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

From the Publisher:

"Deliciously wise and wonderfully erotic."
--Dallas Morning News

"Superbly crafted...a tour de force."
--Los Angeles Times

"An absolutely delicious love story."
--Washington Post Book World

"Generous-hearted, funny, and engaging."
--San Francisco Chronicle

"Her most richly imagined novel to date."
--Emerge

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0385475993
• ISBN 13: 9780385475990
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 462