"Who Will Run The Frog Hospital?

"Who Will Run The Frog Hospital?" is a novel by Lorrie Moore and I'm not sure if I read about it somewhere or if I just picked it up at the library because the title intrigued me.  I took it with me on my recent trip to Kansas and was able to finish the book (just under 150 pages) in just a few days reading part-time.

It was given high reviews by The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and is a national bestseller.  Moore is the author of some story collections as well as this novel and another one, "Anagrams."  She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

The story  follows two friends, Sils and Berie, through their teenage years as well as a bit about their adulthood.  Although the pictures the writing conveys are exceptional and helped me"see" the story as I was reading, I found myself having some difficulty getting into it.

What I took away from the story was a review of my teenage years and my girlfriends and where we are now as far as still having a relationship.  One of my best friends was my friend all through grade school and high school and, when she came to visit a few years ago, we had a great time despite the fact that we differ widely in our views on religion and abortion.  I think we just made a nonverbal pact to not discuss those areas.  Our contact since then has been minimal -- through Facebook and the occasional letter and meeting up a time or two at our all school reunion.  She wrote a novel that I read and enjoyed despite the fact that it touched on areas that I don't particularly agree with in my "real" life.

I have another friend who was very important to me in my high school years because she kept me from sitting at home on Saturday nights while my boyfriend was away at college.  She was funny and had me laughing all the time.  However, now we are on such different ends of the political spectrum that she seems to be angry with me for not being in agreement with her.  I finally unfriended her on Facebook because I didn't like being "yelled" at in writing.  I was pleasantly surprised to have a very nice e-mail from her recently checking to see if I knew of one of our classmate's serious illness.

The friends I have made as an adult (mostly couples that my husband and I became friends with together) are in a different category.  Some of them were our neighbors and others we met through the churches we attended.  Although we have moved away and our religious and political views are more liberal than most of our "old" friends, we can pop in on them when we're in the area and sit down and have a conversation about our lives that feels like we've never been apart.  Those are the friendships I really cherish -- the ones that really mean something to me because it doesn't matter what we believe - we still care about each other and can enjoy one another's company.  pazt