bookworm_gg 's review for:

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

3.0

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I have seen this book both the best and worst books of 2009. I understand why it is on both. Set in 2001, just post 9-11, the protagonist, Tassie, is a 20 year old college student in the Midwest. The book concludes a year later after many events happen around her, but not necessarily to her. There are big events that occur--adoption, death, poisoning, terrorism and war--but oddly, they all seem anticlimatic. Lorrie Moore has beautiful prose, but it doesn't seem to belong to the voice of her young narrator: "...the shoulders of the county trunks were bruised blue with chicory, then snowy with Queen Anne's lace, for a while mixing, making a kind of weed gingham along the roadside. Prairie grass flowers had been replanted in places and in others had never left: meadow rose, Turk's cap, lady slipper, laurel." Beautiful, but not a 20 year old's view. I am not sure I could say what this book is about. In the book, there is a gate at the stairs that is broken; this book also has some fractures.