cover image Sweet Remedy

Sweet Remedy

Linda Phillips Ashour. Simon & Schuster, $23 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-684-81833-7

There's a glut of perkiness in the way 40-year-old Polly Harrison tells of a major wobble in her life and how she got things spinning truly in the end. Life went seriously awry the moment she caught her husband, Tom, getting cozy with another woman in the garden of an oddball beach hotel not far from their L.A. home. She promptly kicked him out, and now, six months later, she's all alone raising Kate and Toby, her surly adolescents, and writing mournful, painfully bad country songs in her spare time. Then, all the way from Granite, Okla., comes Polly's octogenarian grandmother, a feisty old bird in overalls who's a dead ringer for Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies. Can Granny Settle's folksy down-home wisdom pull Polly out of her funk? It's hard to tell, amid the teeming masses of peripheral characters and tangled subplots Ashour pours into her sprawling third novel (after Joy Baby). There's Polly's next-door neighbor, Russell, a wealthy contractor who's got the hots for her; crazy cousin Rory, an old Harley-riding hippie; and Barney, the creepy stalker. And aging country-music legend Johnny Day just might be persuaded to sing one of Polly's songs on tour. With so many balls in the air, Ashour is hard-pressed to keep her chatty narrative moving in the same direction for more than a few pages, but readers who hang in there will eventually learn what becomes of plucky Polly. But by then, they may have forgotten why they ever wanted to know. (May)