Realizing during a trip to Paris that she no longer loves her husband, Berie Carr remembers her childhood in upstate New York, where she shared a deep friendship with a captivating older girl named Sils. Reprint. NYT.
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital (Vintage Contemporaries)
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From Publishers Weekly
A disillusioned, middle-aged woman's remembrance of an ephemeral teenage friendship is triggered by eating cervelles in a Parisian restaurant in Moore's acerbic, witty and affecting third novel (after Like Life). While vacationing in Paris, narrator Berie Carr, whose marriage is stuck in a bleakly funny state of suspended collapse, looks back to her girlhood in Horsehearts, an Adirondack tourist town near the Canadian border. There in the summer of 1972, she was a skinny, 15-year-old misfit who rejected her parents and idolized her sassy, sexually precocious friend Sils, who played Cinderella at a theme park called Storyland where Berie was a cashier. In a series of flashbacks, Berie recounts stealing into bars with Sils; sneaking cigarettes in the shadows of Storyland rides named Memory Lane and The Lost Mine; and how, midway through the summer, she was shipped off to Baptist camp after filching hundreds of dollars from her register to pay for an abortion for Sils. Moore's bitterly funny hymn to vanished adolescence is suffused with droll wordplay, allegorical images of lost innocence and fairy-tale witchery and a poignant awareness of how life's significant events often prove dismally anticlimactic.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
Looking back at her childhood from an unsuccessful marriage, Berie Carr remembers her best friend, Sils, and their last summer together in 1972. They worked in an amusement park, Berie as a cashier, Sils as Cinderella. At 15, they were irreverent, wild, curious, and oblivious to authority, and they spent the summer testing limits. Sils's experiments led to the inevitable unwanted pregnancy, and Berie provided the genius to fund the inevitable abortion. Unfortunately, larceny became a habit for Berie, and she was eventually caught in the act and sent away to church camp. The stories of Sils and of Berie's husband seem to have little to connect them, and Berie's final commentary does not bring them together. Although the pieces are well done, the whole is disjointed. A possible candidate where Moore's works (e.g., Anagrams, LJ 10/1/86) are popular.
Johanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Johanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By J. LIN
Format:Paperback
Let me first say that two books that I think are absurdly over-rated are (1) Lolita (2) Catch-22. Listen to me people. The humor in those two books is the same kind of humor you will find in a third-grade class room if all the students were pretentious nerds who studied their encyclopedias all day long instead of going out to play in the neighborhood, AND, if all the third-graders were given positively reinforced with candy each time they used a word that less than .5% of the general population can understand the meaning of. Listen, that's not all of it, of course. It would take a thousand pages for a complete third-grade/lolita/catch-22 metaphor.
Why you shouldn't buy Lolita/catch-22: the authors are dead. Support people who are alive! The dead don't have to pay rent or buy stuffed animals for loved ones, etc.
It vexes my brain why Lolita is praised by just about everyone for it's suppose-ed beautiful, poetic language. It's absurd. If you want beautiful language, buy THIS BOOK. Just read the first couple pages. It's amazing that Lorrie Moore did this without a computer. Each word is perfect, new, FRESH, inventive, beautiful, original, etc. She is about 100x smarter than you.
The language of this book is so good, I don't even care about the plot. When I read it, the pleasure of each individual sentence is overwhelming, and subsequently, I have no more mental compartments to attend to the plot or anything else. So, even if the plot or the characters or whatever all these other reviewers are saying, is not BELIEVABLE or whatever, you should buy this book, and read sentence like it's poetry.
I'm afraid i've failed to express sufficiently what I really think about this.
Here's one last effort. If language were TV, Lolita would be a skit that didn't make it onto SNL. Who Will Run The Frog Hospital would be a really great novel.
By the way, Anagrams is better, in my opinion.
By S. Rossi
Format:Paperback
I can't believe this novel is so maligned! I've read a lot of Moore, most of her short stories and part of her "Anagrams" (I got so mixed up reading that one I had to put it down), and "Frog Hospital" is by far my favorite. It is such a delicate little book...
As for plot: the book alternates from the protagonist's present state of middle age marital ambiguity (while in Paris, which is described as "Anne Frank in a dress") to the narrators memories of her childhood friend Sils. Sils is manifest throughout, the book is really an elegy for what they meant to each other as girls, before boys came and school changed and adult awkwardness set in. One of the main themes is the narrators attempt to connect with those around her, to both "split her voice" and join in with the voices of those around her in perfect synch.
I'm sorry too ramble, but there is just something so indescribably beautiful about what Moore is trying to illustrate, that I think it goes beyond basic opinions that the book is "depressing." I myself don't like to read heavy solemn novels, I've read all the "Princess Diaries" and not a thing by Hemingway or Faulkner, etc. With Moore I feel like the writing overcomes the sorrow it catalogues, in that it makes it something beautiful ("Middlemarch" is similar, it is depressing but the writing makes it uplifting).
The only negative I can think of is that I did find it hard initially to get into the book, but that may be because Moore is accustomed to the short story form. Anyway, please read this novel, and ignore the negative reviews: it is worth the time.
By Jules
Format:Paperback
This book is definitely interesting, but when I finished it, it still left something to be desired. The events seemed kind of random and had too little emotional reasoning backing them, as if the author were making too much of an effort to be blunt. When I read Judy Blume's "Summer Sisters," I realized that this book was almost a complete ripoff of it. Read "Summer Sisters"; it's much better.
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3.4 out of 5 stars
Most recent customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Unrealistic Characters
This book was a fast read but the characters and their actions were too unbelivable and unrealistic. Read more
Published on April 25 2002 by Deborah Di Gioia
2.0 out of 5 stars
little too ubelievable
This book was interesting in the fact that I couldn't put it down, but it was just a little too unbelievable. Read more
Published on Nov 30 2001
1.0 out of 5 stars
pass the Tylenol
This book gave me a headache. I am a huge fan of Moore's stories but I hated this book. Moore is great but this novel highlights her flaws: a tendency towards pretentiousness, lack... Read more
Published on Aug 16 2001 by Catherine
3.0 out of 5 stars
compulsively readable, but...
Men and women have spent the past 100,000 years or so trying to figure each other out and I'll readily admit that I understand less of this mystery than most other members of the... Read more
Published on Oct 10 2000 by Orrin C. Judd
4.0 out of 5 stars
In Paris we eat brains every night.
This is a slim, powerful book. Yes, we could call it a coming-of-age story, but that's only half the story. Read more
Published on Oct 8 2000 by Just_Karen
3.0 out of 5 stars
Disconnected
A lot of the reminisced portion of the book was very good. I liked the story that took place in the amusement park - but for me she failed to make a connection with the parts of... Read more
Published on Aug 15 2000 by Bill Chance
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Frogs are Better Left Dead
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital is a coming of age novel with commentaries on how relationships develop and disolve. Read more
Published on Mar 9 2000 by Shannon
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not for a Book Group
Reading this book for a book group, we were greatly disappointed. The plot lacked substance and little was told about the characters. Read more
Published on Nov 5 1999
4.0 out of 5 stars
I admire it, but it's incomplete
Lorrie Moore is almost certainly the finest female writer now living. I've read Proulx and Morrison and Munro, and though Morrison has a bit more talent, Lorrie Moore surpasses... Read more
Published on July 23 1999
3.0 out of 5 stars
Pretentious and farfetched
Am I really supposed to believe that two fifteen year olds were served alcohol on a regular basis at local taverns? That they regularly picked up older men and were never raped? Read more
Published on July 3 1999
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