The Quickening

Bernadette Dunne's distinctive gravelly voice, so effective in her recording of The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay, unfortunately makes her depiction of Enidina (Eddie), an early 20th-century farm wife, dull and droning. Carrington MacDuffe's Mary, Eddie's closest neighbor, offers us a better sense of Hoover's lyrical prose, and her family scenes are much livelier. Through child birth and death, drought and flood, heat and cold, war and depression, the two women are drawn together first by necessity and later by complex emotional bonds, then forced apart by internecine family and community struggles. An Other Press hardcover (Reviews, May 10). (Aug.)