Customer Reviews

The Things I Know Best: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I devoured The Things I Know Best in only two days. Lynne Hinton has a gift for taking us into the story and holding us there until the final page. The paper is her canvas and well-chosen words are the medium for guiding us into the settings she creates. She writes simply yet fully. I love her style and her stories. I only wish that there had been a few more chapters to this wonderful novel.

This is a short novel but packs a big story. It is the story of the Ivy women who are each blessed or cursed with a gift of knowing. One can see death coming, the other reads the sky and daughter Liddy knows who people will marry just by looking at their hands. But this is really the story of Liddy's twin Tessa who thinks she sees the future in glass. This is a quick ride thru the summer of the twin's 18th year. It is fast paced and you are along for the ride to the very end. Even tho the future has been forseen doesn't mean that it is fact. Sit down, relax with this book and you won't be able to put it down till the end.

This is not the sort of novel I usually read, but I bought it because Malachy McCourt recommended it, and I wasn't disappointed. It is, indeed, a beautifully written, sweet, sad coming-of-age story, with a lot of local color. Thank you, Malachy, for recommending this delightful tale.

watziznaym@gmail.com

Reader reviews on Amazon for Lynne Hinton's second novel, THINGS I KNOW BEST, indicate that most of those readers were disappointed not to receive another FRIENDSHIP CAKE. That was Hinton's first novel, and it was a delicious whip of church women, their life events and their recipes. Small wonder that this new one isn't to the taste of Cake fans; THE THINGS I KNOW BEST is altogether darker, tangier, and heavier.

That isn't to say it's a dark book; rather, it's a quiet book, and perhaps closer to its author's heart. When she wrote it, Hinton was a United Church of Christ pastor. In an interview on her website, she says that she believes the issue of race relations is the most important one we can resolve today. That issue is central to this book, which tells two interracial stories: one about eighteen-year-old Tessa Ivy of Pleasant Cross, North Carolina, who has a relationship with a boy of mixed race, and one about her mother and her mother's relationship with her best friend, an African-American woman, which is soured for reasons no one will discuss.

Tessa comes from three generations of "Ivy women" who believe they "see things" --- Tessa herself reads tea leaves and interprets dreams. Of course, no one's "knowing," as the Ivy family calls it, has led any of the women to great fortune, although Mama Bertie does use her gift to help the local funeral director keep his schedule straight. They live in a trailer park, and Tessa works at the local supercenter. Much of the background of Tessa's family is revealed during the women's dinner preparation (one is best at cooking meat, another vegetables and a third takes pride in side dishes).

Tessa says, "I suppose it would seem to any ordinary person that Knowing would make the women in our family rich or smart or at the very least well respected; but the truth is the Knowing hasn't given us anything extra. It seems, in fact, to have created a curse. All the Ivy women lean towards making bad decisions, especially when it comes to money and men. And just as we have accepted the ways we all Know, we also have accepted each other's poor choices in husbands and fathers for our children."

THINGS I KNOW BEST concerns Tessa's newly adult attempts to figure out how to make different choices for herself. When the enigmatic and devout Reverend Renfrew comes to town in his Airstream trailer, towing his son Sterling, Tessa finds out that there are things she couldn't possibly "know." Some of those are deeply sad and frightening, others are wonderfully joyful --- but above all, they're true and worth knowing, as opposed to "knowing." Or, as Tessa's grandmother says, "A body could know everything there is to know about the future, but that don't guarantee happiness." Neither will reading this book --- but it's worth a peek.

--- Reviewed by Bethanne Kelly Patrick

I loved this book and can't wait for her next novel! Hinton is becoming one of the fresh new voices of the south.

Author Lynne Hinton has an elegant way with words, and she quietly delights us with this follow up to Friendship Cake.

Told from the standpoint of Tessa, a deceptively simple young woman of 18, the story of the Ivy women, their secrets, loves and heartaches, resonates in the beautiful North Carolina setting. The Ivy women have "the Knowing"..that psychic phenomena that seems to drift in and out of families of southern women. It is that gift, so seldom used by Tessa, that ferrets out an old family secret that will change the lives of the family forever.

Hinton's writing is soothing, and she constructs sentences in a poetic way. A passage about Tessa's Grandaddy:

"He was the moon to us when we were small, big and soothing and full. We didn't hear the stories of his drinking or his heavy hand until the ground over his casket was grassy and flat. Grandma saw no need to spoil our ideas of a good man."

A small book, words are used sparingly and precisely to help the reader get to know the characters, and to read this chapter in their lives with them. A quiet talent is Lynne Hinton...
thanks to an Amazon friend for helping me find her!

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This book really fell flat. Lynne Hinton's first book Friendship Cake what such a good read. I was sincerely disappointed in her second work. She had a good beginning, but after you read awhile the characters begin to become redundant, and a little dull. There was some hope of a good plot, but something was definitly missing. Try again Lynne, you have talent. Maybe try a sequel to Friendship Cake. The characters that you developed in that book are really good.

You trust that Lynne Hinton isn't going to take you to an awful place and then leave you there and she does not.

Hinton tells a gentle story, a difficult story, but you know that, in the end, all things will work together for good, and they do.

I tried to be into this book. It started off okay, but became dull quickly. I kept waiting for something to happen and was disappointed. Sadly, I didn't even finish the book. I just couldn't stay interested.

This book didn't take long to read. A couple of hours at work. It started out ok but didn't really have a point and wandered aimlessly. It isn't on my list of top books I didn't like but wouldn't recommend it!