DISCOVERIES

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Deadly Slipper

A Novel of Death

in the Dordogne

Michelle Wan

Doubleday: 302 pp., $23.95

The Perigord Nord: home of forests and limestone cliffs. Mara has not given up hope of finding her missing twin sister, last seen 19 years ago camping in the area, part of the Dordogne in southwest France. She finds her sister’s camera in an antiques store and has the film developed, revealing photo after photo of rare flowers and an exotic orchid, Lady’s Slipper, hitherto unknown in the Dordogne.

She appeals to the expertise of a local botanist, Julian Wood, and several other unforgettable characters, including the local postman, an elegant emigre from Los Angeles, and her psychologist friend Patsy, over in the States. “Deadly Slipper,” reminiscent of Rosamunde Pilcher’s early novels, such as “The Shell Seekers,” lives on that line between popular fiction and literature. The details of life in the Dordogne, the local flora and fauna, the food, the landscape and the architecture, are beautiful and soothing. Phrases like “laughing softly” threaten to sink the dialogue now and then, but it’s a transporting summer novel, a restful cross between Peter Mayle and “The Orchid Thief.”

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Their Magician

And Other Stories

Gloria Kurian Broder

Handsel Books: 268 pp., $20

This is fiction from the air; fiction with an above-it-all quality; fiction that proves once again that every thing, every event can be seen from a dizzying variety of perspectives. Fiction that laughs in the face of truth (or henpecks it to death). Gloria Kurian Broder accomplishes this with characters that are distillations of the various roles we play (wife, employee, parent, child) and with a kind of time-lapse movement.

One minute they’re babies at Mommy’s knee, the next they’re 23 and she can’t get them out of the house. Some of her characters dig in and refuse to move with the current of reality: take Alexei in “Elena, Unfaithful.” Alexei has been routinely unfaithful all his married life, but rather than accept his wife’s death, he insists she has run off with another man, and he rather admires her for it.

Take Hepplemeyer, an orthodontist who had a miserable childhood, in “The Insult.” When he sees graffiti that reads, “Hepplemeyer is an ass” and “Hepplemeyer is a turd,” he tries frantically to erase the words before his 13-year-old son gets out of school. When his son explains that the graffiti is intended for him, that it was written by the class bully and that the words don’t bother him in the least, Hepplemeyer is not just relieved, his whole sorry childhood is vindicated.

Broder has a bit of fun with American suburbia: The men sell jewelry, furniture and candy for a living; the women are snobbish about silly things; the children are trapped and often ugly. (“Arianne was too awkward, Eva too mean, Ilya too pulling, and Katya unaccountably squashy and low to the ground.”) In fact, all middle-aged self-assuredness lies in Broder’s crosshairs. In the title story, two self-righteous sisters will not let their father live his own life. They insist that things remain the same.

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Rhythm

of the Chain

Young Writers Explore Teamwork

Students of Animo Inglewood Charter High School

In conjunction with 826LA

826LA: 184 pp., $12 paper

Dave EGGERS’ creation 826LA didn’t waste any time, blowing into Los Angeles (using the nonprofit model created by Eggers and others in the San Francisco Bay Area), finding a home at Beyond Baroque in Venice, setting up programs for school-age writers and publishing their work, all in under a year.

During his hiatus from the Lakers, Phil Jackson spent a chunk of his time volunteering with high school kids in the writing program at 826LA. He asked his 42 students to write about teamwork. The students wrote several drafts of pieces, including a 55-page screenplay and essays on gang relations, family, being a foster child and basketball at Animo High. “You think I’m young and don’t know much about life and still have a long ways to go,” writes Daniela Dowells in her poem “My Family Is My Flower Bed.” “But I have reached my pinnacle of rising towards the sun.”