In her latest, Sprinkle (Carley’s Song
) abandons mystery for pure melodrama, following two down-on-their-luck sisters reconverging on their father’s farm in Solace, Ga. When the bottom falls out of Maggie Baxter’s safe upper-middle-class family life, she takes her sons and moves back to daddy’s farm, where her sister, Billie, and Billie’s disabled daughter, live hand-to-mouth following the disappearance of Billie’s husband. The two sisters spend sweltering summer days in their father’s kitchen with elderly friend Mamie Fountain, who is dying of congestive heart failure, and Mexican immigrant Emerita Gomez, who has lost her family. The only respite from these characters’ gloom-and-doom circumstances is the reappearance of Billie’s good-hearted high school heartthrob. Sprinkle has a gift for developing a full, rich world, but her narrative spends far too long spinning its wheels, considering and reconsidering each woman’s miseries without moving beyond them. (Mar.)
