The Things I Know Best - ISBNLookup.com

Malachy McCourt

"A lovely book."

Robert Inman

"Hinton is a wise and elegant storyteller...a book to be savored and treasured.

Joan Medlicott

"A wise and deeply moving story .The language of this novel soars and lifts one’s spirit with it."

Marianne Williamson

Exceptionally compelling.

Robert Inman

Hinton is a wise and elegant storyteller...a book to be savored and treasured.

Joan Medlicott

A wise and deeply moving story .The language of this novel soars and lifts one's spirit with it.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Hinton's second book is an even more compelling and enjoyable slice of smalltown life than her bestselling debut novel, Friendship Cake. Tessa, the 18-year-old narrator, belongs to the Ivy clan: a trailer-park-dwelling family full of strong women with unusual gifts for "knowing" things. Tessa's mother, Mama Bertie, can predict deaths in the community; her grandmother foretells the weather; and her twin sister, Liddy, reads palms. Tessa's own cryptic glimpses of the future come in tea leaves and dreams. The novel revolves around her attempts to unravel the mysteries of her visions and her family's secrets. There is Mama Bertie's bitter enmity toward her best friend from youth (an issue no one will discuss), and her suspiciously close relationship with the preacher. There is the strange hostility of Mr. Jenkins, one of the richest men in town. And there is the deeply spiritual Reverend Renfrew, who rolls into town in an old Airstream trailer with his own secrets and ways of "knowing." Hinton guides us through this landscape of absorbing characters with good humor and a gift for mixing the mystical with the everyday. Dialogues take place amid simple activities brought so cinematically to life that the visual images fairly jump out. Hinton even escapes triteness in her description of Tessa's first love, a relationship that pulls everyone's secrets together and out into the open. The prose is fresh, the characters absorbing, and Hinton achieves the resolution of the novel's mysteries through a satisfying blend of love, death, grace and redemption. (May) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

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. Authortour