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)
