Baby of the Family - Hardcover

Ansa, Tina McElroy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 015110431X ISBN 13: 9780151104314

Publisher: Harcourt, 1989

Synopsis

An evocative, delicately comic story of a girlā€™s coming of age. From the moment of her birth in a rural black hospital in Georgia, Lena McPherson is recognized as a special child, with the power to see ghosts and predict the future. Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.

About this title

About the Author:

Tina McElroy Ansa is the author of Baby of the Family, The Hand I Fan With, and You Know Better. A frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she can be seen on the CBS News Sunday Morning segment "Postcards from Georgia." She lives with her husband on St. Simons Island, Georgia.

Review:

In this engaging coming-of-age novel by a new black writer, young Lena McPherson leads a charmed life, secure in her family and in the world Ansa evokes. 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. Following Lena's first friendships, her years at school, her observations of her parents' sometimes stormy relationship, her grief at her grandmother's death, Ansa beautifully renders Lena's stable, well-off world. Readers get a view of middle-class black small-town life in the relatively placid mid-century, a time when a grandmother scorns the black families who vacation at the beach, and where a little girl often feels her life is dictated solely by demands that she keep her hair dry and combed. Ansa's thorough and affectionate portrait marks her as a writer of both promise and achievement.
(Publishers Weekly )

YA-- A coming-of-age novel with ethnic and supernatural threads that weave reality with the mystical. Born in Georgia in the late 1950s, Lena McPherson was special at birth--she was born with a caul or veil over her face, indicating the presence of magical and psychic powers. Young adults are sure to relate to Lena as she grows up with her family, her peers, and the other adults who frequent her parents' successful bar and liquor store business. Besides the human characters, Lena also learns to deal with apparitions that only she can see, such as Rachel, a young slave who gives Lena insight into what slavery was like and the emotional effects it had on the individual. Ansa's dialogue is realistic, and her characters are colorful. The supernatural elements are well blended into the novel, adding to the richness of the fiction.
- Krystal K. Irven, Willowridge High School, Sugarland, TX
(School Library Journal )

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 015110431X
• ISBN 13: 9780151104314
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 265