A Fine Daughter

A single mother and her teenage daughter awaken a starkly conventional Alberta prairie town in this gentle first novel set in the 1950s. Most of Little Cypress has considered Fran McLellan strange, if not dangerous, since she arrived in town pregnant 17 years ago, taking a job and a room at Gorkey's general store. Niven chronicles the ways Fran and her daughter Cora subtly disrupt the community. Winnie McRae is a model housewife and a faithful reader of Woman's Home Companion; she considers Fran scandalous (and overweight). Winnie's husband, Frank, the town barber, doesn't know the secrets his wife hides. Another couple, Mari and Howard, struggle to understand their young son Elwood, who prefers to be called Davy Crockett. Gorkey himself must care for his dying mother, who refuses to leave her room. Authoritative ""Good Doctor"" Edward Johnson spells out his ideas of family values in his column for the local newspaper. His son Flury has fallen in love with Cora, who, received opinion has it, will turn out just like her mother. In this conformist milieu, Fran and Cora represent the distant threat and prospect of women's independence. On a climactic day that begins with an ominous storm and ends with a crowd of monarch butterflies, the characters reveal their passions. Niven's language is finely attuned to scents and tastes, to gesture and kinesthesia; sentence rhythms follow her characters' mental and bodily states, from anxiety to excitement to exhaustion. Her evocative prose can be more complex than her characters, who come across as types rather than individuals. Still, this is a deeply felt sketch of one town's time of change. Like the wind that heralds the butterflies, Niven's tale ends up ""sweet as overripe apples."" (Aug.)