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You Know Better: A Novel Kindle Edition

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 67 ratings

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.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The pleasures of Tina McElroy Ansa's sharp-witted fourth novel, You Know Better, are obvious from the first pages, in which we are introduced to the author's lovable, imperfect characters, her gift for capturing the rhythms of speech, and her dead-on observations of African American family life at the turn of the 21st century. In her hands, what could've read like Touched by an Angel instead is a tender and rueful study of the forces that shape three generations of women. Lily, a successful former school teacher and administrator, is out at midnight, combing the streets of her small Georgia town for her teenage granddaughter, LaShawndra, who's in trouble again. Lily's daughter, Sandra, is too busy making money and trying to attract the new pastor to pay attention to the chaos of LaShawndra's life, let alone to take responsibility for the girl's misbehavior or her low self-esteem. But before the next day is over, each of the women will be visited by a guiding spirit and forced to face what they have been running from. A spiritual novel free of sentimentality or preaching, You Know Better suggests that most people already know what's wrong with their lives, but it may take divine intervention to motivate them to fix their problems. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

African-American favorite Ansa (The Hand I Fan With) focuses in her fourth novel on three generations of troubled women in a small Georgia town, employing the Dickensian device of ghostly guides to lead them to enlightenment. The Peach Blossom Festival is upon tiny Mulberry, but the Pines women have little reason for rejoicing. LaShawndra, an 18-year-old "coochie" who engages in indiscriminate sex and whose greatest aspiration is to dance in a music video, has disappeared. Her mother, Sandra, is too busy with her real estate career, her new romance with a pastor and youth-enhancing beauty treatments to look for LaShawndra. So it falls to the girl's grandmother, Lily, a respected pillar of the community, to perform the search. The book is a first-person triptych, the three Pines women taking turns from oldest to youngest in detailing how they arrived at this latest crisis point and each has a different spirit guide to help her out. Ansa has a clear prose style, and she does a fine job of getting inside the women's heads; the chief problem is that, with the exception of Lily, her protagonists are unsympathetic. Lily herself overplays the religion card, while Sandra and LaShawndra are too selfish to rouse much sympathy. One thing they have in common: all three take the scenic route in their extended confessions, resulting in a book that is almost all past history with very little plot.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0018ND88Y
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins e-books; Perennial ed. edition (October 13, 2009)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 13, 2009
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 849 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 340 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 67 ratings

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Tina McElroy Ansa
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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
67 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2015
I thought this book was a slow read but this book was so full of wisdom & guidance. It was a spiritual & inspirational read. I recommend to all ladies that hasn't discovered their purpose in life and needs guidance & words of inspiration...
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2023
Book was in excellent condition. I would buy from this book company anytime.
Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2013
This is my second time reading this book and I love it this time a little better because I was able to read it on my tablet. The book is excellent no matter where you read it.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2002
This is the first novel by Tina McElroy Ansa that I've read and, I suspect--judging from the reviews in the press--that it's not by any means her best. It's hard to compare "You Know Better" to anything else I've read: its technique and style are original (and occasionally brilliant), but the substance of the novel is a bit shallow and, in the end, excessively preachy. The book was good enough, however, to make me want to read another of Ansa's novels.
"You Know Better" relates a day in the life of Lily Paine Pines, her daughter Sandra, and her granddaughter LaShawndra--three women in the Georgia town of Mulberry whose lives are thrown into disarray after LaShawndra commits an unspecified crime. (Ansa tries to lend an aura of mystery and suspense as to the nature of the crime, but the secret, when it is revealed, is a bit of a let-down.) Each woman is visited by a different "ghost of Mulberry past"--three recently departed denizens who resemble the women who are still living and who want to help this troubled family experience the successes and avoid the mistakes they made during their own lives. None of the Pines women realize, however, that their traveling companions are dead.
I nearly gave up on this book after the first 80 pages (although I'm glad I didn't). The author divides the novel into three nearly equal parts, with each woman narrating one section. Although Ansa is extraordinarily adept at distinguishing between the three voices (from the patient schoolmarmish tone of the elder Pines woman to the hip-hop banter of the granddaughter), the grandmother tends to speak in annoying cliches ("third time's the charm," "bless her little heart," "pretty as a picture," "not a pretty picture") and groan-worthy truisms that never deserved to see the light of print ... Yes, it's the way my Texan grandmother speaks as well, but reading 100 pages of it is a bit painful.
The novel gets much better, though. One of the book's accomplishments is the author's ability to keep things interesting even though everything takes place in cars, as the three women are driving around Georgia talking to their ghost companions and reflecting on their family problems. Naturally, the three still-living women make much of the differences between them, but Ansa delights in making obvious how similar they are. And it's that similarity that, in the end, brings them to their salvation.
7 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2015
This author is one of my favorites. She has a quick wit and a wonderful way of crafting her characters. The dialogue does not disappoint.
One person found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2014
Always a pleasure to read Ms McElroy Ansa' s work. Love the humor and the human of her writing. BIG FAN!
Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2002
I have to say that out of all the Ansa books, I enjoyed reading this one the best. This was cute, funny and sometimes right. The first two sagas of Lily and Sandra were really good and kept my attention the entire time. The spirits were right on the money. LaShawndra's story started to get a little boring and the name calling got a bit out of control, but her story needed to be told to make the others come to full circle. They all had issues and I am sure every woman could relate in some way or another to one of these women.
I was glad to see them come to a happy ending and to love one another like family should. Overall, this was a really good book and easy to read. Highly recommended.
3 people found this helpful
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