A BLESSED EVENT

Page's debut treats readers to a juicy read with a spiritual side, set in smalltown Texas. Childhood best friends Joanne Timbro and Darla Stevens have found an unusual solution to Darla's fertility problem: Cal, Darla's husband, will impregnate Joanne the old-fashioned way, and then Cal and Darla will raise the child. Things might have worked out if Joanne hadn't driven her car off the road and into Darla and Cal's bedroom, "crunching [their] wall like a Saltine cracker." Though Joanne is brain dead, the fetus—at nearly five months—is alive. The hospital involves Joanne's parents in the decision whether to keep Joanne on life support, despite her tempestuous relationship with them, which Page reveals through chapter-long flashbacks. As Darla fights for the baby's future and struggles with revelations about Cal's feelings for Joanne, she also must come to terms with realizing that she didn't know Joanne, Joanne's father (a high school coach they both feared) or her own husband as well as she thought she did. When a surprise confidante of Joanne's turns up—Sean Latham, a Catholic priest whom Darla dated in high school—Darla turns to him for comfort, too, which places even more strain on her marriage. The story is intricate and the characters' relationships are all very fraught—at times, the novel feels like a soap opera—but Page deserves praise for her sympathetic protagonists and her strong evocation of 1970s and '80s Texas. (Mar.)