BOOK REVIEW : Rebirth of Mother-Daughter Bond : THEN SHE FOUND ME <i> by Elinor Lipman</i> Pocket Books $18.95, 263 pages

Everyone has a mother. Some more than one.

“My biological mother was 17 when she had me in 1952, and even that was more than I wanted to know about her.

“Adopted was a label that never made me flinch. Its meaning within our family was ‘hand-selected,’ ‘star-crossed,’ ‘precious.’ ”

Those two observations noted, the voice goes on, echoing the fears of millions of children who dread not ghosts and witches, but their own flesh and blood: “Still, I slept with a light on in my bedroom until I was 12, afraid she’d exercise her rights.”

In fewer than 20 lines, a nameless female narrator tells the reader what this story is about, who and what will occupy our attention. “I did not attend support groups for adoptees and I did not search for anyone. And then she found me.”

Don’t look for glittering wardrobes, exotic locales, physical action.

This is not a novel that spans four continents with a poor-but- soon-to-be-wealthy woman taking lovers all over the landscape. It is a small story about a big issue--the mother-daughter relationship. This is a novel that a high school English teacher in the ‘50s would approve of.

The heroine is a sensible woman. In this metamorphic tale of a modest high school Latin teacher, April Epner, a Boston-born woman in her 30s whose biological mother, Bernice Braverman, comes into her life rather neatly after the death of her adoptive parents, Gertrude and Julius Epner.

April is a nice girl. She lives her life within driving distance. She is not sleeping around. In fact, until her mother shows up, she doesn’t fall in love. And when she does, it is with the high school librarian whom it seems no one else wants because he is such a geek. He turns out to be April’s Prince Charming, a man with values, devotion and a sense of perspective and the absurd.

Author Elinor Lipman is visiting instructor of creative writing at Hampshire College, and she lives in Massachusetts, says the book copy, with her husband and two children. She reminds one what nice, easy-to-read, satisfying fiction is about. There are no loose ends, no extra sentences, no character who is unclear.

There are people, such as my cousin Bonnie, who have spent years searching for their birth parents. There are people the same as my newest nephew, Robert Francis, whose birth mother, my sister-in-law tells me, visits regularly. “And Then She Found Me” is not about those kinds of people. Its agonies are few, its compromises small and easy to understand.

The issues of biology and heredity are examined. Who and what is a mother is part of the discourse of this book. The universal cry, Mommy , can be read through every page. The influence of “primary caretakers” and theatrical off-again-on-again parenting is clear.

Because the story is so well crafted, the drama becomes one of a woman reared by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, extending the boundaries of her affections to include such a late-20th-Century creation as Bernice, a local talk-show hostess with a contemporary passion for full disclosure.

It becomes one of Bernice calming down and April lightening up. Most women I know could use both, and this fictional account is fine medicine for calming down and lightening up.

Mix a little April with a little Bernice and you have two happy women in the end. Read Lipman’s novel and wish that you could take a class from her in how to move a story along and make every word count.

Next: Elaine Kendall reviews Roy Blount’s “First Hubby” (Villard Books).