Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

By Lorrie Moore

I went in biased to this novel: I am a fan of Lorrie Moore. I've read a couple of her short stories and found those to be wonderfully hilarious. When I opened this book, I thought it would be like that, but it wasn't.

This is the story of Benoîte-Marie "Berie" Carr, a middle aged woman who is visiting Paris with her husband Daniel. Well it's kind of about that. It's also about Silsby "Sils" Chaucée, Berie's childhood friend. The book starts with "In Paris we eat brains every night," and it works from there until the narrator, Berie, has decided to remember her past, and what was. Berie and Sils work at an amusement park, and as the back of the book says, everything is good until Sils gets pregnant.

I'll start with my disappointments in this book. Lorrie Moore has a style of writing that can be too lofty at points. As much as love her jokes and witty remarks, she can also drag something from a sentence into a whole paragraph, sometimes more, and she has no reason to. It adds length to this very short novel, and without it will might only be a novella, but a novella would have worked.

With that said: I found this book to be silly where it needed to be, and sad when it needed to be. She had a way of making you sad, but at the same time you were smiling. Everything that happened happened because of Sils, and it always fell on Berie, but at the same time, they had a wonderful last summer together until Berie got caught. This book was the lost memory of childhood, the ability to do almost anything they wanted without really worrying about what adulthood was going to be like. Berie was reminiscing about the lost teenage years and wonders, "What happened?" If you like stories that can throw you around, you should really get a hold of this novel. Lorrie Moore has shown herself as one of the top contemporary writers.

4.5 stars

Next novel: The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter