Lorrie Moore Critical Essay | Critical Review by Victoria Jenkins

Critical Review by Victoria Jenkins

SOURCE: Jenkins, Victoria. “Two Teenage Girls, One Praying ‘For Things to Happen.’” Chicago Tribune Books (23 October 1994): 3.

In the following positive review, Jenkins examines the themes and characterization in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (an odd, unpromising title for this slim, exquisite memoiristic novel) opens in Paris, where Benoite-Marie Carr and her husband, Daniel, eat brains every night. He likes the “vaporous, fishy mousse of them,” but “Me, I'm eating for a flashback,” Berie says, “hoping for something Proustian, all that forgotten childhood.” She gets it, too, not in Proustian volume but in exhilarating, crystalline recall.

The year Berie flashes back to is 1972, the summer she is 15 and working as a ticket seller in an upstate New York theme park called Storyland, where rides and enactments depict nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and local girls dressed up as Bo-Peep...
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