Who Will Run the Frog Hospital

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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. (Oct.)

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

Donna Seaman

Moore isn't prolific, but she is proficient, powerful, and, to those who treasure her irony and skittish tenderness, precious. In her first novel since "Anagrams" 1986, Moore has deepened her palette and increased her discernment into the complex states of loneliness and lovingness. This tale, set in the seventies in a small upstate New York town, is about a profound friendship between two fifteen-year-old girls, Benoite-Marie Carr, Berie for short, and the beautiful and kind Silsby Chausee, called Sils. Berie narrates in a voice that reaches directly into the part of your brain that cradles your own memories of youth's fierce convictions and wild näivete. For Berie, Sils was a hero, and she recalls her worshipful and self-sacrificing love for her friend in long, careful flashbacks. Currently, Berie is in Paris attempting to save her severely jeopardized marriage. As a teenager, she was skinny and slow to ripen, standing loyally by as her curvaceous friend entered into her first and ultimately tragic love affair. But Berie was also passionate and daring, qualities that enabled her to transform her wounds and regrets into a sort of tapestried armor, a needlepoint narrative in which each protective word is a stitch made with precision and a flash of light.

Michiko Kakutani

Touches and dazzles and entertains…an enchanting novel…Ms. Moore has fully come in to her own as a writer. Leaping off from where her earlier fiction began, the book not only uses the full spectrum of her revealed talents but also uncovers new gifts of lyricism and tenderness at the some time. Though often uproariously funny, the book is, at heart, an elegy, reminiscent at times of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited for the passage of innocence and youth, and the fading of expectations and dreams.
—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times