For the 15-year-old evangelically raised and home-schooled runaway of Michelle Latiolais's novella She, stepping off the bus from Needles, Calif., is like "the stone being rolled away from the sepulchral door... and emerging into the sunlight and into the huge blue Los Angeles sky." She carries only a pink backpack with her grandmother's wallet, a toothbrush, toilet paper, a needle and thread, and a card for a runaway hotline. A leather-jacketed man in worn cowboy boots lets her share his cab to Santa Monica, where she exits on Ocean Ave. Naïve perhaps, but determined and practical, the unnamed girl ("one of the small unnamed shes of the field and of the sky") sets out to find food and shelter. Like the angels of the city's name, a string of mostly good-hearted but often disconnected and slightly off-plumb locals steps up to help--a cop who rousts her for identification but lets her go, a gallery owner needing her hem mended, a grieving man with a sink full of dirty dishes to clean, a homeless woman at a bus stop with a suitcase full of paperbacks to give away, an overworked freelance cake decorator looking for a helper.
Co-director of the UC-Irvine writing programs, Latiolais has published both novels (A Proper Knowledge) and stories (Widow). In She, the chapters of the eponymous novella are separated by nine other stories, demonstrating the best of both worlds. The effect of this intriguing structure and Latiolais's precise writing is a rich portrait of the quirky life of the "Lotus Land" city where some go to find freedom and others strive to exercise it. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.