#67 A Gate at the Stairs

365 Blog Challenge: Post #67

Rating 3.5/5 stars

This book was a gift from good ol' Jamie Lyn (thanks Jame!), and I have very mixed feelings about it.  Lorrie Moore is an award winning writer who often writes short stories but also has a few novels out there.  In my creative writing class, we read an essay by her entitled "How to Become a Writer", which I loved.  She is so good at observing seemingly non-important things and making them funny, the awkward, the absurd, the subtle.  While Moore carries this writing style into A Gate at the Stairs and for the development of the main character Tassie, it works, her excessive attention to detail at times overwhelmed me and drowned the story a little.

The story revolves around Tassie, a 20-year-old college student who is from a small farm town in Illinois.  Tassie is hired as a "child care provider" for a couple in her college town and accompanies them on a trip to Green Bay, WI to pick up Mary (later Mary-Emma), a biracial child they plan to adopt.  Tassie, an intelligent, funny, yet lonely girl, learns to care deeply for Mary-Emma, and becomes a part of the (dysfunctional) family.  I found Tassie extremely likeable and felt Moore's voice as Tassie was one of the best parts of this book.

Other plot points include Tassie's first romance with a "Brazilian" named Reynaldo, and her brother, Robert's enrollment in the military shortly after 9/11.  I felt that the focus of these other events seemed uneven.  The most compelling and fluid parts of the story revolved around Mary-Emma, racism and the imperfections of Mary-Emma's adoptive parents.  I felt Moore pulled you out of the story for unnecessary amounts of time when she detailed Reynaldo and Robert.

But what do I know?  This book was a finalist for the PEN/Falkner award and named best book of the year in multiple highly regarded publications including the New York Times.  Moore is definitely a quality writer, but I felt this book could have been refined a bit more.  Perhaps her short stories are a bit more taut.

Moore is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and she writes quite a bit about the Midwest.