When Love Calls, You Better Answer

May 30, 2005
Motivational speaker Berry (Redemption Song ) packs a lot into a folksy, feel-good little novel narrated by a meddling ghost. Poor benighted Bernita Brown has been lured into the arms of several Mr. Wrongs--a boyfriend on the down low, a white New Age guru obsessed with his previous African lives, and a handsome married pastor. Her deceased Aunt Babe, who gabbily observes Bernita's travails from the afterlife, is big on name-dropping black artists and writers, big on self-help-influenced analysis and advice and big on a plan to hook Bernita up with a man who once yelled "good morning" to her from a delivery truck. Bernita ignored him, but Babe knows they're meant to be together. She speaks through every medium within her ghostly reach, including television, radio and a psychic friend of Bernita's, to guide her niece toward true love. Berry has used the ancestors for public service announcements before--her The Haunting of Hip Hop features a group of undead elders who decry the negatives messages of rap--and this episodic story can feel similarly didactic. But Babe is a winning narrator, and the book's conclusion, in which love triumphs, long-lost family members are reunited and villains get their comeuppance, is sentimentally delightful. Agent, Victoria Sanders.