Laurel Decher's Fiction

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THE WOUNDED BOOK

Love can be found even if you can't see the person who loves you.

Bella, an eleven-year-old, crafty singer of chants with a penchant for smuggling herself into and out of monastery libraries, abbeys and empires, longs to know her dead Papa in a tangible way. She gets her hands on his book of psalms, only to lose it to a Greek priest, a Byzantine Patriarch, and a swamp. How Bella rescues _The Wounded Book_ and finds evidence of her Papa's love is the story of this YA novel set in AD 1000 on both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.

Link to the Bella and the Morning Star blog

Essay

Read the essay: "Half A Library."

Libraries that have been important in my life are the subject of this essay--one that let me experience the atmosphere of Buchenwald concentration camp and one that let me touch 1000-year-old manuscripts that inspired Bella's story.

Short story

"Unforseen Times"

Recently, George Mason, a 43-year-old Vermonter, discovered a new way to get in touch with his mother, who had died the previous fall. She had read Gerard Manley Hopkins' poems to him often, but he had never read them himself. He discovered they now came off the page in his mother's voice. Now he read them aloud, often stumbling over words that recalled her most vividly.
"It's called 'My Own Heart'--isn't that just what you have been since you were born?" she said."That's you George. You are my own heart. . . .

Windhover: A Journal of Christian Literature, January 2006.

© Laurel Decher 2005-2009