SOURCE: Shone, Tom. “Smart-Aleck Scenes.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4779 (4 November 1994): 22.

In the following review, Shone offers a positive assessment of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, commending Moore's characterizations and serious themes.

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? begins with this sentence: “In Paris we eat brains each night.” It's a typical opening from a writer who has mastered the art of button-holing New Yorker readers; but it will raise a particular question among Moore's fans: is Lorrie Moore eating her words? For braininess—and in particular its pipsqueak younger brother, quickwittedness—is something her fiction normally prizes above all else. Her stories brim over with clever, cranial bits of word play—puns, anagrams, wisecracks—which are usually to be found on the lips of her heroines. They are a distinct type: bundles of bangles and bravado who keep the world at arm's distance with their spiky tactlessness...