Reviews of three new books. All We Know of Love by Katie Schneider (Broadway Books, 279 pages, $22.95)   Katie Schneider Broadway Books, 1714 NE Broadway, 284-1726. 7 pm Tuesday, Nov. 28.     Portland's literary landscape is a bit brighter now that home gal Katie Schneider has published her debut novel. All We Know of Love tells the story of Joanna Shepherd, a gifted but naive artist who returns to Bright River, her childhood home in rural eastern Washington, after broadening her horizons in Florence, Italy, and New York. But instead of settling back into her community, she isolates herself on the abandoned family farm. Battling the ghosts of her dead mother and grandfather, Joanna pines for her high-school boyfriend, beats herself up for past sins and talks to horses. But the novel isn't quite as simplistic as it sounds. Schneider uses lovely prose to loop seamlessly through time, from the farm to Italy to New York and back, dropping nice little plot developments along the way. Joanna is a dreamy, complex character who suffers from serious communication challenges; this explains why she's so very alone. But as she ponders her past, uncovering some meaty family mysteries, she eventually finds the ability to express herself verbally as easily as she does artistically. Schneider also includes plenty of allusions to art, history and Catholicism, which add a richness to her austere style. Her tone is calm and sincere, full of quiet authority, though somewhat humorless. Like her main character, Schneider seems to appreciate the subtle comedies of life like a late-night Virgin Mary visitation in the kitchen or a wardrobe gleaned from Grandpa's old pajamas. All told, All We Know of Love is an impressive and exciting debut; Portland is lucky to have Schneider. Susan Wickstrom God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church by Caroline Fraser (Henry Holt, 565 pages, $16)       Just in time for the Mother Church's expansion in Boston, Caroline Fraser has produced God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, her exhaustively researched excoriation of the Christian Science Church, now in paperback with a new afterword. Begun by Mary Baker Eddy in 1875, Christian Science is one of five major religious movements bearing the stamp "Made in 19th-century America" (the others are Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, the Jehovah's Witnesses and Pentecostalism). To varying degrees, all five combined health concerns and spirituality. It was Eddy, however, who made health the church's cornerstone, corralling elements of mesmerism, spiritualism and homeopathy to explain the phenomenon of healing in specifically religious terms, and to give ecclesiastical structure to the result. Christian Science's reliance on faith healing and its dismissal of mainstream medicine are understandable in the context of the pre-germ theory 19th century; the continuation of such practices today, however, is harder to fathom. Raised a Scientist, Fraser left the church after a 12-year-old member of her congregation died from untreated appendicitis. With a fury born of personal experience and an eye for narrative detail (Fraser was on The New Yorker's editorial board), she traces the growth of Christian Science from an obscure sect to a politically powerful church, which once received Medicare funds for nursing homes devoid of medicine and legal protection for parents who refuse their children treatment. Among the book's few faults, Fraser might have better explained why 19th-century Americans--ravaged by smallpox and tuberculosis--were drawn to Eddy's theories. That said, Fraser presents a compelling case against Christian Science health practices and the law's studied silence regarding them. Rachel Graham The Oxygen Man by Steve Yarbrough (Scribner, 280 pages, $12)   Steve Yarbrough Powell's 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651 7 pm Monday, Nov. 27     Steve Yarbrough's Mississippi Delta aches with loss and regret in The Oxygen Man, his first novel. Poisoned fish ponds, betrayal and beer-guzzling good ol' boys make for a town seething with rage and racial tension. The battle over lucrative fish spills into fights between black and white, rich and poor and brother and sister, and violence lies coiled beneath the surface of the text like the deadly cottonmouths on the bank of the river. When control over a fortune in catfish is threatened, the old guard sets out to prove that rifles beat morals every time, and Yarbrough's main characters, siblings Ned and Daisy Rose, find themselves caught in the precarious middle. Their white-trash beginnings have placed them on one of the low rungs of the social ladder and left them there, despite their innate nobility. For others in the town, the shackles have gone but slavery is as real as the stifling heat. "For some folks, everything in between the beginning and the end was just a fight for breath, just one long struggle to suck in air or water or food, anything to fill the cavities that threatened to expand inside those folks until they themselves were walking raging nothings...the sum of their natures null." Unable to forgive past mistakes, Yarbrough's characters wage a bitter war against each other with closed doors and averted glances, until embracing their shared heritage becomes the only hope for deliverance. The Oxygen Man is a gorgeous combination of loyalty, poverty, triumph and defeat, cocked with the safety off, following the tradition of Southern writer-gods Larry Brown and Harry Crews. Ritah Parrish