In her dazzling new novel -- her first in more than a decade -- Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love. As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer -- his "Keltjin potatoes" are justifiably famous -- has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Awards
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Release date
September 1, 2009 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780792768395
- File size: 345725 KB
- Duration: 12:00:15
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Lorrie Moore's new novel, for which fans have waited more than 10 years, is a lyrical and edgy examination of growing up American. In it, we follow Tassie, a Midwestern college student, through the joys, tribulations, and all-out strangeness of being 20. Moore, a poet, has Tassie tell her own story in a voice that, like many English majors, is both naive and self-consciously elegiac. Narrator Mia Barron reads unhurriedly, emphasizing the eloquence of the words. This sounds just as Tassie might sound reading it aloud to herself, proud of the beauty of the text. While this irritates occasionally, it also seems right, and makes this an interesting novel read intriguingly and well. A.C.S. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from July 13, 2009
Moore (Anagrams
) knits together the shadow of 9/11 and a young girl's bumpy coming-of-age in this luminous, heart-wrenchingly wry novel—the author's first in 15 years. Tassie Keltjin, 20, a smalltown girl weathering a clumsy college year in “the Athens of the Midwest,” is taken on as prospective nanny by brittle Sarah Brink, the proprietor of a pricey restaurant who is desperate to adopt a baby despite her dodgy past. Subsequent “adventures in prospective motherhood” involve a pregnant girl “with scarcely a tooth in her head” and a white birth mother abandoned by her African-American boyfriend—both encounters expose class and racial prejudice to an increasingly less naïve Tassie. In a parallel tale, Tassie lands a lover, enigmatic Reynaldo, who tries to keep certain parts of his life a secret from Tassie. Moore's graceful prose considers serious emotional and political issues with low-key clarity and poignancy, while generous flashes of wit—Tessie the sexual innocent using her roommate's vibrator to stir her chocolate milk—endow this stellar novel with great heart.
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