Morning

The one flaw in the marriage of blond, voluptuous Sara Kendall and her blond, virile husband Steve, the one ill wind ruffling the calm of their home on Nantucket, is Sara's inability to conceive a child. Thayer's plodding narrative focuses on Sara's ritual temperature-taking and calendar-watching and her monthly disappointments. Her frustrationsjealousy of all child-bearing women and especially of Mary, Steve's bitchily fertile former girlfriendboil up into accusations against her hapless husband. Then Sara finds a fascinating story about a Kansas farm girl turned international temptress interpolated among the otherwise uninteresting pages of a novel she is editing, recognizes its enormous literary merit and autobiographical verisimilitude, forces her way into the writer's reclusive presence and sees the rewritten novel through to its prize-winning publication. Two further happy events ensue, which will not surprise readers of Thayer's (Stepping) romances. Here, the prose verges on the insipid and the characters resemble Barbie dolls. (January 28)