For some reason I was not aware of Lorrie Moore until I heard about her most recent book “A Gate at the Stairs“. I’m thrilled to have discovered her and I’m looking forward to reading as much as I can from her. “Frog Hospital” is a wander down memory lane. Moore and I are contemporaries so me (and a few billion other boomers) will easily recognize her sense of time. The place was a bit more foreign to me; it almost felt like Canadian though since Minnesota is so close to Canada that’s not too su...

En general, I love me some Lorrie Moore. I thought Gate at the Stairs was funny and brilliant. The last story in Birds of America made me cry (Or at least it made me want to cry. I think I was in a good mood when I read it). But this book felt it was written while Moore was watching TV, or else that she dashed off a quick draft and sent it to her editor and it somehow got published, even though it was just a first draft. It reminded me of when you go to an art gallery, and they have some special...

This is the second novel by Lorrie Moore that I have read, and now I want to read some of her short stories. This is a minimalist novel that alternates between the narrator as an adult with a tenuous marriage and narrator as a teenager in small-town America, embroiled in a friendship with another girl that she later revisits. Much is summarized; the highlighted moments are important and tender, several strands pulled into an impressionistic picture.

Oh the melancholy I don't want to grow old like this. I don't want to grow up like this. Everything fading, friendships over, marriage falling apart, all of it so realistic and it's like nothing good happens to you in life after you go off to university but I'm already at university and so much is still happening, and there are still so many friendships that haven't ended. So my problem with this is the same as my problem with Moore's short stories -- it's so realistic that it stops being realis...

I could not figure out where in Upstate New York this book was supposed to take place. The name of the town sounded like somewhere out near Elmira, details of the town at times sounded like Saratoga, but other details made the town sounds smaller, and more like a place sort of near Lake George. But then the distances mentioned at the end of the book made none of the earlier distances sounds correct. I'll ignore certain details and place the book as being in Saratoga, and the theme park as being

Every once in a while you read a news story about a recluse who's devoted his life to some miniature: the New York skyline on a grain of rice, Angkor Wat in porcelain. This is how this novel feels to me. (I should note I have no reason to believe that Lorrie Moore is a bearded recluse.) Frog Hospital -- which I love, love, love -- isn't a novel of great inventiveness, or scope, or wisdom. It is a book of breathtaking craft. Moore takes her stock-standard, ever-powerful themes -- innocence and it...

"Once I saw a girl who'd been fired the year before driving around town still wearing that pinafore and dress. She was crazy, people said. But they didn't have to say."There's no better writer of sentences, no funnier cultural being, than Lorrie Moore. The humor here comes, as always, fast and unexpectedly, the left cross of a joke landing while we're focused on the looping right of a plot arc. The main thrust of this novel is fantastic and poignant, as the lead remembers an adolescent year wi

2 ½ starsWho Will Run the Frog Hospital is the first book I have read by Lorrie Moore. Apparently it has been eight years since she last published a novel. My sense here is that she simply tried too hard, or perhaps she was shooting for something that she couldn’t quite pull off, because the story – two stories, really – didn’t connect in the way I suspected she wanted them to. Interactions between characters felt disjointed, and the writing often came across as contrived: Earl was Earl Gray, a

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? makes me want to sing in a choir and skip service at the same time. a novel written from the perspective of a 40-something woman recounting her last summer as the best friend of an underage demigoddess, Lorrie Moore weaves bittersweet nostalgia with the present. (there is no there there.) berrie carr eats parisian brains in an attempt to taste something familiar, she catches up with her rich french-american friend living off french welfare who reminds her of sils,...

Lorrie Moore's prose is, at just the right moments, lofty and lyrical without ever being pretentious. Yes, it's a coming of age story about the awkwardness of transition, a storyline that's been done over and over and over again, yet never quite like this. Moore makes it seem effortless. She introduces us to Berie and Sils and their small bubble of a universe and 148 pages later we're nostalgic and reminiscent and more than a wee bit sad. I get that this isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea.

The weather systems in girls' lives and friendships are worthy of serious study. That is the thesis of this perfect book.

Lorrie Moore is quickly becoming one of my favorite literary fiction writers. She has a perfect blend of insight and humor mixed into her writing, a combination that leaves you smiling even as something painful or awkward is happening in the story. While this didn't grab me as much as A Gate at the Stairs or Like Life, it was still a pleasure to read. If literary fiction is your thing, definitely check out Moore's books.

this book is short but the writing is rich and dense, in a really good way, like flourless chocolate cake. and funny! when I finished I felt like I had read too quickly, not savored enough. already itching to read again

4.5 stars In Paris we eat brains every night. So begins Lorrie Moore's sumptuous novel(la) Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, a work that's two-thirds girls-coming-of-age-in-the-Nixon-years and one-third a tale of middle-age regret and lost opportunities. That it's compressed into 150 pages (which, when reading, feels much longer, in a good way) imbued throughout with a "you-are-there" feeling, chock-full of memorable lines, is remarkable. It starts with Benoîte-Marie (Berie) in Paris, travelin...

Ugh, this novel. It somehow does the impossible and portrays both the seeming simplicity of adolescence and the complexity and feeling of loss (whether actual or symbolic) that comes with retrospection. Stories of teenage friendships and youth and coming of age have been told a million times, but I promise Frog Hospital is different. Somewhere, Moore stated that in discussed relationships of marital intensity, often only traditional marriage is touched upon. However, Frog Hospital reminds the re...

I really liked this but it did not have the same magical effect for me as it seemed to have had for others. I think it’s beautiful writing, and I especially loved the very very last scene

Moore unfolds an important female friendship between two teenagers residing in Quebec during the 1970s. Interspersed within this story readers are inserted into the recent adult moments belonging to the narrator, Berie, who at present is married and visiting Paris with her geneticist husband.The story alternates back and forth during which readers gain first impressions of love between two friends escaping the oddities and constraints of their daily lives.Time moves the friend’s lives forward an...

Summer of 1972. Small town in upstate New York. Two fifteen-year-old girls who are best friends. They engage in a lot of risky behaviors with shady people. Their lives begin to diverge as one of them gets involved with an older boy and the other gets into brazen thievery. Having once been a fifteen-year-old girl myself, I really connected with this story. When we're in high school, we feel like the whole wide world is out there waiting for us. Everything is a lark. Anything is possible in our fu...