FICTION

SUMMERTIME by Maureen McCoy (Poseidon: $15.95; 288 pp.). Maureen McCoy’s second novel, “Summertime,” presents three generations of Iowa women straddling the boundary between inertia and change. After a 20-year illness, the death of the man who held them together as son, husband and father has released each into her own private limbo.

Octogenarian Jessamine, a tart charmer who bitterly resents the regimentation of life at her retirement home, takes a husband from among her peers. Jessamine’s recently widowed daughter-in-law Alice runs a booming and very funny Craftique business that mail-orders do-it-yourself gewgaws nationwide. Alice begins an is-it-or-isn’t-it relationship with a brisk, no-nonsense widower obsessed that the soybeans he grows should be tofu ice cream and cupcakes, not hog fodder. And Alice’s grown daughter Carla lives in what her mother considers a “wheatberry dream” by the Mississippi with a husband “dedicated to pointless regression.”

McCoy writes beautifully and her characters are equally engaging across the generations. Things do happen in “Summertime,” but they’re the tiny actions of everyday life, and a bit more plot couldn’t possibly have hurt. Still, the appearance of this book so close on the heels of McCoy’s charming 1986 first novel, “Walking After Midnight,” offers the exciting promise of more to come.