Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
By Lorrie Moore (147 pages)
Published by Vintage
Bookish rating: 4

As Berie travels in Paris with her not-spectacular husband, she remembers, through a series of flashbacks, a youthful summer in 1972 and her relationship with her ballsy BFF, Sils.

Moore brilliantly captures the neurosis and optimistic anything-can-happen! nature of adolescence, along with the adult realization that life really isn't as sparkly or exciting as you had thought when 15 years old. Moore is witty and unbelievably clever with words--but in a way that benefits the text rather than showing off her ability twist words.

Although I understood Moore contrasting Berie's hum-drum stagnant marriage in what is supposed to be one of the most beautiful, exciting cities in the world--Paris--with her surprisingly MORE exciting existence in a small Adirondack tourist town, I couldn't quite figure out what the instigating reason was for Berie suddenly having all these 1972 flashbacks.

This was my second Lorrie Moore novel (having already read A Gate at the Stairs), and I love the originality and wry wit-plus-depth of Moore's writing style.

The Unseen

The Unseen
By Alexandra Sokoloff (328 pages)
Published by St. Martin's Press
Bookish rating: 3.75

It being the spooky month of October and all, I just can't help but dive into darker reading. I'm a Sokoloff fan, and The Unseen is a fun ghost (well, poltergeist) tale of the Rhine parapsychology experiments at Duke University (a real thing).

I actually worked--briefly--for the University of Virginia's School of Medicine's perceptual studies department (one of my multiple jobs in grad school), doing tasks related to paranormal research. For reals. So, Sokoloff's portrayal of the academic approach to and treatment of parapsychology actually seemed pretty accurate to me. Well, sort of. Sure, my disc man (yes, THAT long ago) never seemed to properly work around there, but that was the limit of any poltergeist activity I saw. Bummer.

Anyway, our heroine--Laurel--investigates a mystery as to why the Duke lab was shut down, eventually deciding to recreate what appeared to be the defining experiment--holing up with some sexually charged college students in a haunted house. Of course.

I liked how Sokoloff--like Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of Hill House (my all-time favorite ghost story)--uses the suggestion of evil or creepiness rather than just the overt icky to generate the thrills. Also, I'm partial to academic settings, which made this a fun book to read. The ending left me wanting  a little something and seemed rather rushed or incomplete, so I docked a quarter star from what would've been a 4.

So, bookish peeps: This is a well-crafted ghost (sorry! poltergeist) story, perfect for late October reading. Really, that's all you need to know. Recommended.

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers
By Lois-Ann Yamanaka (276 pages)
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Bookish rating: 3

Here's the thing with books published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux: You feel really obligated to really like the book. If you don't, you must entertain the possibility that you are not a very capable, sophisticated reader. And no bookish girl wants to believe THAT.

Here, Yamanaka's collection of stories is nicely done, providing some intensely creative insight into the back woods (does Hawai'i have woods?) of the Hilo area on the Big Island in the 1970s. It's a blue-collar area, and Lovey Nariyoshi comes of age with her BFF Jerry. Her family is Japanese-American, but Lovey longs to be and do things like the haole (translation: white) kids. Her parents, of course, mock this (understandable) adolescent yearning for something perceived as better, and the poor girl has a rough time reconciling identity with her burning desire to have a particular clothing item or a tape recorder.

Together, Yamanaka's stories successfully give a stirring impression of adolescence, Japanese-American assimilation in Hawai'i, and the almost-poverty of some of its inhabitants and exposes the fact that, like any tropical place colonized in one way or another, the islands are not all about surfing and suntan oil.

All that said, reading this book was slow going and tiresome at times. I could see the literary tricks Yamanaka pulled off, but I really felt like I was reading this for class. Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is a good book--just not one that I enjoyed much.