softcover_sarah 's review for:

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

5.0

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The experience of reading this book reminded me why I love reading. Moore's prose dances elegantly and reverently in the style of the Sufi dervish, twirling from humor to grief, from aimless naivety to worldly confidence. The magic of the prose does not prepare the reader for the twists of the novel's plot, and appropriately so, as we are asked to face them with the same preparedness to which Tassie has access--that being, none at all. In this way, Moore puts her reader in the shoes of a 20-year-old girl, struggling into her identity as a woman against race, deceit, love, loneliness, loss, unable to see herself in the faces of women around her: childless, motherless, nameless, and placeless in the rapidly changing world of the early 2000s. A gorgeous, patient, quietly beautiful novel.