Saturday, March 6, 2010

A Young Woman's Journey

In the UW Alumni magazine, famous Oprah Book Club Winner Jackie Mitchard describes A Gate at the Stairs, the latest novel by UW Prof. Lorrie Moore:

"It tells the story of one year in the life of twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjien, a potato farmer's daughter attending college in a fictional Madison immediately post-9/11, who is a nanny for the mixed-race toddler adopted by her beleaguered and eccentric employer, Sarah Brink.  Besides being a coming-of-age story, the book is heartbreaking, rum, tragic, witty, and trenchant social commentary:  the protagonist loses her virginity to a feckless lad who may or may not be a jihadist and then loses her brother to the war in Afghanistan."

Damn, I didn't realize you could lose at Mad Libs.

 
The stairs represent the process of reading this book; the landscape, the lives of those reading it.  Sadly, in the end, there is no gate.

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