Ordinary Miracles

YA author Crew ( Children of the River ) makes her adult fiction debut with this simple, well-intentioned novel about a couple battling infertility. Gil and Betsy Bonden own a small farm in Mary's Bend, Ore., where he also teaches in the local middle school and she hangs wallpaper in remodeled houses. Married for a decade, Gil and Betsy are a happy, straightforward couple in their early 30s whose lives would be perfect if only they could have a baby. While Crew attempts to show the strain put upon a marriage, family relationships and friendships when a couple who desperately wants a child cannot conceive, she shies away from the more complicated emotions inherent in such a potentially destructive situation. Part of the problem is that the story is told mostly in Betsy's relentlessly perky voice, in which painful situations are met with such responses as ``gosh,'' ``what a bummer,'' ``what the heck,'' ``whoosh,'' and ``good grief.'' And nothing much happens beyond Betsy's next fertility treatment and her unremitting ``baby lust.'' Neither plot nor prose manages to strike more than one gentle note. However, readers who value the heartwarming over the complex will find Betsy Bonden a comforting and inspirational fictional companion. (Feb.)