Blue Becomes You is another of the small-town novels that are nearly as numerous as the communities that inspire them. Sixty-three-year-old Charlotte Weiss has arrhythmia and must retire after more than 40 years as head baker at the only bakery in tiny Norman, Manitoba. Most of this first novel takes place in the week leading up to the big retirement party, which Charlotte is defiant about even attending, much less enjoying.

What’s to celebrate in being forced out of work by a rickety heart? The supporting characters – a motley cast of bakery co-workers, Charlotte’s sister June, and a kind Indian neighbour named Kuldip – rally around Charlotte to show her, each in his or her own way, that in losing the capacity to work, she will gain the freedom she’s never had.

The novel gains much of its thematic weight through its elucidations of the tensions between desire and duty, dreams and conscience, and the way such tensions serve to highlight the limits of time and human mortality. The characters’ lives abound with missed opportunities. A series of flashbacks reveal Charlotte to have once been a promising jazz bassist who hoped to tour the world through music, until her mother’s death and her father’s subsequent breakdown condemned her, duty-bound, to remain a baker in Norman forever.

Von Kampen’s compassion for her characters is undeniable. The secondary characters are given histories that show them to be no less acquainted with tragedy than Charlotte; the main thing linking the characters’ stories is the uniformity of their sadness. This leads to one of the novel’s problems: too many stories tenuously linked. The point of view shifts too often away from Charlotte at crucial moments, particularly during the retirement party that is meant to serve as the novel’s climax.

The characters’ diversity might have been more engaging had it not been muted by a stylistically flat narrative voice that renders almost everyone’s thought patterns identical. The rhythm of prose is also constantly disrupted by clumsy repetition. Von Kampen has the compassion and curiosity of a good writer, but the flimsy rigging of her sentences sinks what otherwise might have been another solid entry in CanLit’s seemingly endless flotilla of buoyant paeans to rural virtue.