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Jul 06, 2011

Bonnie rated it:

2 ½ stars

Who 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 E More...

11 comments like (13 people liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Michael rated it:

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. Not to speculate about Ms. Moore, who I have no reason to believe is a bearded recluse (indeed, the author photo informs me she is a stone-cold hottie). 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. Moo More...

0 comments like (13 people liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Michael rated it:

First off, let me say that I adore Moore's short stories. *Adore.* And find her work as a novelist as lacking in real bite or interest as, say, the novels of Ethan Canin, which are some kind of horrible. I read part of this once before and gave up and only picked it up again because someone I esteem loves it.

Hard pressed to explain why this novel so irritated me. It is written beautifully, of course; and the core story--about a seventies girlhood in a small town with the usual coming More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Greg rated it:

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 bei More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Joan rated it:

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.

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Cynthia rated it:

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 to More...

22 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Allison rated it:

In many ways, this is your standard issue depressing young-girl-coming-of-age story:

Beautiful butterfly pinned to the corkboard of life--check!

The Awkward One--check!

Languorous, sticky summer days--check!

Teenage trauma--check!

A turning point whence the protagonists shall never return--check!

A narrator surveying her adolescent landscape many years removed and concluding that she shall never, ever experience such a poignant More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

alana rated it:

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 so More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Rebecca rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Marie rated it:

I remember a member of our book group recommending this book not long after it was first published...and I've always remembered the title. Great title!

This was, for me, another book that didn't reach its full potential. Possibly because I found the grown woman a bit difficult to relate to, stuck in an unhappy marriage with no deep connections with any other human beings.

As she looks back on her childhood friendship with Sils, I found it easier to relate to her. This book More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Lee rated it:

I rarely read books about young girls (especially after reading a few too many YA-ish manuscripts at ye olde graduate school and elsewhere). This short novel was therefore a soft shock to my system -- my revulsion alarms were on, but never went off. In fact, every few pages burst with vivid images, fresh sentences, or what they call "poignancy". I actually felt my heartstrings pulled (I apparently have them!). I liked the parts in Paris when the narrator is older, eating Divorce cookie More...

9 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Laila rated it:

This woman can write! Like this.

"Passing cafes and restaurants, I walk through the bright glance of men in love, who, looking briefly away from the lover across from them in order to more perfectly form a sentence, unwittingly cast their gaze across my path like a light. And so, momentarily, to have accidentally caught their desire, swimming across the current of it like that, passing through, I feel loved, in a warm and random way, wandering through it, as if it were a rainbo More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Dec 16, 2011

Paul rated it:

Didn't really work for me. Sentimental, for one thing. Also, I just can't really see Lorrie Moore as a novelist. Or, rather, she just hasn't shown herself to be one, to me. There isn't much nuance to her characters; they're mostly vehicles for clever little non sequiturs. Having not read her stories for a while, I can't say why this works so brilliantly in her shorter pieces, but it seems a bit false in at least this novel. Whatever, I didn't really care about the characters, or what happened to More...

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Sep 03, 2011

Sarah rated it:

"Joni Mitchell was keening Little Green on Sils's record player. Sils listened to that song all the time now, like some woeful soundtrack. The soprano slides and oos of the song always made us both sing along, when I was there. 'Little green, be a gypsy dancer.' Twenty years later at a cocktail party, I would watch an entire roomful of women, one by one and in bunches, begin to sing this song when it came on over the sound system. They quit conversations, touched people's arms, turned towar More...

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Jan 03, 2012

Courtney rated it:

I love Lorrie Moore. I love her. Sometimes she writes sentences that speak to me so startlingly that I have to pause and wonder if maybe she was writing directly to me, if maybe I was her sole intended reader. I think we would be friends, if we met.

That being said (and really, I can't stress it enough: I love Lorrie Moore), I was underwhelmed by Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? It's a wonderful, short little book, but I left the last page feeling deeply unsatisfied. It felt less like More...

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Oct 19, 2011

Coral rated it:

I don't usually read Literary Fiction, but it was assigned for my Seminar in Fiction class. A book I can honestly say I would not have finished, and probably would not have purchased at all, if it hadn't been assigned.

The flashbacks were ridiculously convoluted and served very little real point in the story. I kept waiting for Berie to come back to the present-day timeline and give me something to make me want to read, but it just never happened. Actually, not much happened at all. I More...

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Jul 06, 2011

L a n c e rated it:

reading this book there were times when i forgot i was reading lorrie moore, and then with one or two sentences i was reminded why i love her stories. this book is no where near as good as her collections, but those lorrie moore moments make this book worth reading.

i have no memory of what this book is about.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Noah rated it:

good writing; decent story (better story would've been a five). i like lorrie moore. she's smart, witty, bitter. And tender. "I felt...like we were all planets in the same solar system - which was all I had ever wanted or asked from people, anyone, ever."

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Michelle rated it:

This book quietly destroys me. I mean that in the best possible way, friendships, growing up, working at an amusement park. Ah August in the the humid northeast.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 28, 2011

Cheryl rated it:

A slim novel but one of the best. The slender ones usually are. Or at least more likely to be than the fat ones.
A disillusioned woman, sort of stumbling through but forward in life, looks back on her coming of age and her relationship with her best friend. Captures the persona of a young teenager —funny, wisecracking at times, yet often tender and childlike, longing for simultaneous innocent childhood and adventurous adulthood.
“…my grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with t More...

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Aug 12, 2011

Aaron rated it:

WWRTFH is the first I've read by Lorrie Moore, and discovered it after having read that Tao Lin cited her as an influence. Despite having found her via Tao Lin, the imagery and emotion of the book was probably the best part of the novel. She did a really good job of portraying and making you feel what it was to be a girl in a small upstate New York town in the 60s / 70s - the feelings and experiences which are unique to that time and age. She was a bit cloying at times, but with a story largely More...

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Jul 06, 2011

Lara rated it:

Struck a sad and relevant chord with me to do with the attrition of childhood friendship.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 06, 2011

Katie rated it:

I loved this book. Loved it. So much it's compelled me to add additional commentary for the first time in like four years. The whole work resonated very strongly with me, from the overarching themes to the word level. What's the story: a thirtysomething couple living in Paris, trying to make sense of their relationship, intercut with memories from the wife's summer when she was 15 years old, learning about the world. What's more, the wife really struggles to bridge the gap in self between r More...

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Jul 06, 2011

Holly rated it:

Berie, and American on vacation in Paris, recalls the summer she was 15, a summer that changed her life forever.

Does this book resonate w/ all women who had a best friend, a soul mate, when they were very young? This story, or at least the emotional undercurrent, had eerie overlap w/ my childhood and teenage years, but I'm convinced that Moore is such an excellent writer than even a man reading this book (I believe boys can have very different experiences w/ "best friends") More...

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Feb 10, 2012

Shivanee rated it:

Excerpted from the full review:

"Admit it — you know you’ve got one.

Along with a paraphernalia-packed drawer of your idealistic, angry years betwixt eleven and nineteen, and every holdover memento that’s defied the lure of the garbage or local Goodwill/Salvation Army, (you feign laziness, unwillingness to ‘spring clean’, but you damned well know it’s nostalgia) — along with these, you keep the memory of a best friend. You braided her hair in thousands (you know, like, thi More...

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Jul 06, 2011

Esther rated it:

Most of the time I read a coming-of-age-story set in the time period in which the writer grew up I tend to assume the book is thinly-veiled autobiography. I think that's a natural impulse, and though it must be annoying for the writers of such stories, that impulse usually indicates that the characters and the story are both believable and interesting.
I "believed" Who Will Run the Frog Hospital the way I would believe a stranger who came up to me on the street and told me that sh More...

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Jul 06, 2011

Eric rated it:

A short, bittersweet novel about two teen friends growing up and getting in trouble in upstate New York. Parts of the story made me laugh out loud, parts of it made me blue, and parts of it exasperated me, as Moore perfectly captured the irrational mumbling and behaviors of kids at fifteen. Language, music, meanness and love; puberty, family, crime and religion: there's all that and more packed into this book. Thanks to Margaret Girouard for sending it my way.

"For a semester More...

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Jul 06, 2011

Allison rated it:

While I'm getting a bit tired of this plot line - the shy girl who's best friends with and a bit obsessed with the sexy, outgoing, a little crazy, and therefore much more interesting girl - and all it's unavoidable predictability, it's nostalgia for a romanticized girlhood that seems to exist more in the collective cultural imagination than in reality (or maybe I just really missed out on something growing up). Anyway, while I'm getting a bit tired of this plot, I loved Lorrie Moore's version o More...

2 comments like

Jul 06, 2011

Daisy rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like

Jul 06, 2011

Sarah705 rated it:

I thought that this book was okay. It seemed to have some really significant meaning, but it was lurking under the surface, and I really didn't understand it so well. I found the book kind of boring, and over all pretty depressing.

Throughout the whole story, Berie was struggling with self-doubt and her own sense of who she was. I think that this is a commonly faced issue, and in the book, no one really understood the position Berie was in. She was a teenage girl who didn't really kno More...

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