Bestselling author Tina McElroy Ansa is back with another tale from Mulberry, Georgia, the richly drawn fictional town and home of the extraordinary Lena McPherson.  Lena, now forty-five and tired of being "the hand everyone fans with," has grown weary of shouldering the town's problems and wants to find a little love and companionship for herself.  So she and a friend perform a supernatural ritual to conjure up a man for Lena.  She gets one all right: a ghost named Herman who, though dead for one hundred years, is full of life and all man.  His love changes Lena's life forever, satisfying as never before both her physical and spiritual needs.  Filled with the same "humor, grace, and great respect for power of the particular" ( The New York Times Book Review ) as her previous critically acclaimed novels, Baby of the Family and Ugly Ways, The Hand I Fan With   is yet another memorable and life-affirming tale from one of America's best-loved authors. This novel is a sequel to Tina McElroy Ansa's Baby of the Family , in which readers were introduced to her heroine, Lena McPherson. Lena was born with a caul over her face, a fold of skin that, according to the elderly of Mulberry, Georgia, promises good fortune. Indeed, Lena is blessed--and cursed--with the ability to read minds, a gift that has fueled her commercial prosperity and her numerous community projects but has also, she feels, stifled her romantic life. It's hard to fall in love with a man whose meanest thoughts are plain to you, Lena finds. The author's solution to Lena's dilemma is a ghost: Herman, who has been dead for a century but who still has "plenty of life in him." This unlikely coupling--and couple they do, overcoming the usual obstacles to human-astral intercourse--leads to a kind of happiness for Lena as McElroy explores her fictional Southern world. A woman desperate for love and companionship performs a supernatural ritual with a friend to produce a man. What she gets instead is a ghost?and he changes her life forever. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Lena McPherson, the baby in Ansa's first novel, Baby of the Family (1989), has grown up and is now the town matriarch. Although her childhood experiences, both with the supernatural and the living, have helped her to become a woman of courage and compassion, Lena is still that special child born with the veil over her eyes whose insight and clairvoyance make her revered and cherished by the citizens of Mulberry. She is affectionately referred to as the "hand I fan with" because of her generosity and goodwill toward her extended family, local associates, and childhood enemies. But the center of this novel is her relationship with the spirit, Herman, which is compassionate and as fulfilling as any male/female relationship she has yet experienced. They share a year together, learning about each other. During this time, Lena realizes that she can not assume her special abilities will give her all the solutions to all the problems. But Herman's time with Lena is strictly an awakening, for just as mysteriously as he comes into her life, he leaves. Fans of Ansa's supernatural characters will enjoy this sequel. Lillian Lewis Ansa's second Lena McPherson novel (after Baby of the Family, 1989) is short on plot and long on rhapsodic descriptions of the worshipped Lena. When the Big Flood of '94 hits Mulberry, Georgia, none of Mulberry's residents are surprised when Lena McPherson escapes disaster-free. Of course, no one resents her either; the 45-year- old Lena is beautiful, rich, intelligent, outfitted in couture clothing, and good down to the very bottom of her soul. Her business prowess is legendary, her philanthropy an accepted fact, and her bar/restaurant, The Place, which she inherited from her parents, is the hottest spot around. So the town idolizes her, children and adults alike--but no one can really understand why Lena doesn't ``have a man of her own.'' What they don't know (although they do know that Lena has been marked since birth as ``special'' because she was born with ``a veil''--a piece of fetal membrane--over her face) is that Lena is in love, with a recently appeared spirit named Herman that only she can see or feel. In fact, she's happier than ever. Herman is the man she's been dreaming of: He cooks dinner, waits for her to get home from work, takes evening swims with her. He even encourages her to do more with her blessings--as in the home she opens for needy children and adolescents. Of course, the Herman situation eventually comes to a head--it's hard to live in the real world with a spirit for a lover--but Lena ends up the richer for her yearlong affair, in more ways than one. Ansa writes energetically, colorfully, even evocatively at times (after closing, she can ``almost touch their backs [The Place's regulars] like taps for the draft beer'' as she passes their stools,) but boy-meets-girl is the extent of the story here, and in the end it's just not enou