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Adult Books - Fiction - General Fiction
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A Gate at the Stairs.
Moore, Lorrie (author).
Sept. 2009. 336p. Knopf, hardcover, $25 (9780375409288).
REVIEW.
First published July, 2009 (Booklist).
Readers of Moore’s other works will feel right at home with this one, which recounts a year in the life of college student Tassie Keltgin. Although not completely part of her small Wisconsin farming community (her mother is Jewish, her father grows exotic potatoes), she feels adrift in the college town of Troy. She is hired as a child-care provider by Sarah and Edward Brink-Thornwood, sophisticated transplants from the East Coast who are in the process of adopting a child. The child they end up with is Mary, a biracial two-year-old. Sarah, owner of a high-end restaurant, and Edward, a researcher at the university, are curiously uninvolved parents, and Tassie and Mary are left to their own devices more often than not. Tassie herself is “fresh from childhood,” as she puts it, her head still stuffed with fairy tales. Through the events of the year, which include sexual initiation, brushes with racism, heartbreaking revelations, and family tragedy, she discovers that the adult world has “grim and gruesome” fairy tales of its own. Moore serves up disorder and disaster but also humor and a feast of recurring themes—the way people use language; the changing of the seasons; food, from mashed bananas for babies to fennel-cured salmon noisettes. The unique vision and exquisite writing cast a spell. — Mary Ellen Quinn
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