Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle was an upstart in the publishing world…. Six of One is a bright and worthy successor.

Nickel, a young woman whom we just might confuse with Rita Mae Brown, returns to her hometown, the jaunty Runnymede on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. It is a madcap mixture of North and South, folk spunk and high elegance, and defiantly its own place. The author explores the town's cultural psychology like an American Evelyn Waugh, finding dignity and beauty without bypassing the zany and the corrupt. The present of the novel, 1980, gives way to several excursions to the past, beginning in 1908. In this shifting of scenes through the decades, Nickel learns that hers is a rich legacy: Runnymede's women.

Three generations of spirited women surmount parochial codes and ladylike priorities through harrowing crises and in harmless pranks….

If at times the comedy veers toward slapstick, and if...