Friday's Daughter

Sprinkle's (Hold Up the Sky) newest comingles many of the worst qualities of Southern fiction with a cloying Cinderella story line. After nursing her father, one-time college president and state senator King MacAllester, through death, Teensie discovers that he left their ancestral home equally to all three MacAllester daughters rather than solely to her, as he'd promised, so that she might convert it into a nursing home. This bequest pleases no one, and they put the house on the market, leaving Teensie, jobless and middle-aged, caught between demanding, narrow-minded sisters who have their own ideas as to not only where she's to live her life, but how. Complicating matters is a job she takes as a home nurse for Tobias Jones, a Native American farmer suffering from hepatitis. Though Jones holds a 200-year-old grudge against the MacAllesters for stealing his people's land, he and Teensie form deep feelings for each other. They suffer the prejudices of Teensie's sisters, but unite over the care of three distant Native American relatives recently made motherless. Sprinkle writes inert prose and fails to create convincing characters. (Mar.)