A gate at the stairs:

I love coming of age novels, perhaps it is because I still feel like I am deciding who I will become in life. I never know if I should recommend the 'coming of age' novel to others. Since it is a theme I continue to return to, I don't know if others find it as comforting as I do. I also wonder if one day I will grow out of liking this type of book and thus find my answer on whether or not I should have recommended it or not.

All of that being said, I truly enjoyed this book and I want to know what others think of it. Below are a few notes I took while reading and, of course, quotes - really great quotes.

There is an ominous tone that hovers over the story.Tassie continuously says 'I didn't understand then', 'I would understand later' etc. At first I didn't understand the point. It seemed overdone, but as the novel progresses it makes perfect sense. There is a tone to growing up, the realization that you don't understand what is going on all the time and that one day it might make sense.

Even the parts that are alluded to are so striking when they finally occur that their foreshadowed occurrences fade away at the beauty of the scene itself.

The last line of the novel was strange and did not seem like it flowed with the rest of the book, but I think that's my only real criticism.

Really beautiful quotes:

'Which I never grew tired of, until I did'.

"It was like the classic scene in the movies when one lover is on the train and one is on the platform, and the train starts to take off and the one on the platform starts to trot along and then sprint and then gives up all together...except in this case I was all the parts."

"Life was spent in all sorts of ways."

"We put our things in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty."