The exclusive beach community of Oak Bluffs is a mecca for the crème de la crème of black society. Thirty years ago Amelia Vaux Tanner and her husband built Chateau Laveau, a house high on the bluffs. Ama's favorite guests have always been her three "goddaughters:" Esperanza "Perry" Soto, a talented Afro-Latina lawyer; Olivia Jones, a Wall Street analyst; and Billie Hayden, a marine biologist. This summer Ama, now nearing seventy-one, is moving...

"With her wise, wry, and poignant novels of families and friendships--Waiting to Exhale, Getting to Happy, and A Day Late and a Dollar Short among them--Terry McMillan has touched millions of readers. Now, in her eighth novel, McMillan gives exuberant voice to characters who reveal how we live now--at least as lived in a racially diverse Los Angeles neighborhood. Who Asked You? opens as Trinetta leaves her two young sons with her mother, Betty Jean,...

"Magnolia Brown is nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan. She feels stuck and haunted: by her overdrawn bank account, her predatory landlord, and the ghost of her late grandmother Mama Brown. One night, while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia's luck around with a lucrative "modeling" job at his family's funeral home. She accepts. But despite things...

Savvy Sheldon knows it's time for some renovations: her high-stress low-thanks job, her clueless boyfriend, and the falling-apart kitchen she inherited from her grandma. Starting from the outside in she tackles the kitchen, her relationship with her body, her work-life balance (or lack thereof) and, last but not least, her love life. It turns out that the contractor she hires is the same sexy stranger she unintentionally offended by judging based...