Lily of the Valley

Adding ''Lily of the Valley'' to her two earlier books, Suzanne Strempek Shea (''Hoopi Shoopi Donna,'' ''Selling the Lite of Heaven'') has surely become the unofficial official novelist of central Massachusetts. She has a distinctive voice - comic, bittersweet, a bit old-fashioned - and a distinctive sense of place, rooted in the church- and family-centered Polish neighborhoods of the shabby industrial towns west of Worcester and east of the Berkshires. Here her heroine is Lily Wilk, an artist whose practical bent and absence of ambition have left her only vaguely dissatisfied with the life of sign painting and pet portraits to which she has resigned herself. Mourning the breakup of her marriage and her parents' defection to Florida, Lily is feeling blue, until she receives a surprising commission from a rich old woman, the self-made supermarket queen of the Connecticut Valley, who wants her to paint a family portrait from a collection of photographs. Missing her own family terribly, Lily fails to note the implications of this odd request. Although the route is unexpected, Lily does manage to produce a painting that is the talk of the town, while also recalling what we're supposed to do when life hands us lemons. In her novels the author has quietly created a quirky American version of English village fiction, wry and closely observed. Though her heroines' horizons may be narrow, their sorrows and triumphs are no less affecting for being confined to the most prosaic of hopes and the most prosaic of places.