THE THINGS I KNOW BEST

The author of Friendship Cake (not reviewed) takes readers to tiny Pleasant Cross, North Carolina, where everybody knows everybody else’s business—and some know more.

Eighteen-year-old Tessa Ivy, for one. She has second sight, like all the women in her family: Grandma Pinot can foretell the weather; Aunt Doris interprets dreams; and Tessa’s twin sister, Liddy, reads palms. Townsfolk fear the supernatural skill the Ivy women call “Knowing,” although some see it as a strange gift from God. It certainly hasn’t made them rich: the local undertaker pays a monthly allowance to the twins’ Mama Bertie, who can predict who will die next, but aside from that small windfall the Ivys just get by like everyone else. When Liddy takes a job at a seedy bar on the outskirts of town, Mama Bertie is furious, but she’s got other things to worry about. Tessa is injured in a car crash, slips into a coma, and awakens to find that her ability to perceive what others can’t has intensified. She drifts through her days, seeing the mundane world around her in a very different light, then falls in love with a young man she barely knows: Sterling Renfrow, the adopted son of a traveling black preacher. Sterling is biracial, but no one seems to know who his parents were. Tessa doesn’t care, even though it’s risky to cross the color line in rural North Carolina. She is beset by visions and nightmares that provide tantalizing clues to the identities of Sterling’s parents. Reverend Renfrow, a charismatic and powerful man, dies of a stroke before he can enlighten her, but Tessa understands at the close that the reverend had a Knowing all his own.

Lyrical and light, with an appealing small-town cast.