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delprenr's review against another edition
4.0
I love books that feel real, the one's that aren't always the happiest because sometimes real life doesn't have the best ending. This book was slightly depressing, but felt like it could happen to any family faced with tragedy.
heat_her's review against another edition
5.0
Even though I finished reading Carry the One at the very end of December, because my best-of-2011 post had already been written, this book will be going on my best-of-2012 list without a doubt. It was so good that I can already make that claim after reading only three other books so far this year. Carol Anshaw’s writing is wonderful, and although I thought the storyline was very good, it is Anshaw’s writing that made this book great. The prose in Carry the One is beautiful.
Read more of my review on Between the Covers...
Read more of my review on Between the Covers...
ashleymarcolini's review against another edition
4.0
Carol Anshaw's "Carry The One" is one of the most interesting books I've read in a long time. Many of the structures Anshaw builds within this text deviate from the standard - almost formulaic - version of what a "novel" is. She achieves many things within this space that other writers - both novice and experienced - would fail to do. While the story doesn't make you gasp, it makes you think. And that, to me, is what makes it so valuable.
"Carry The One" promises to follow around a series of characters who share a moment of tragedy. Instead of focusing on said tragedy, Anshaw follows three siblings - Nick, Carmen, and Alice - from adolescence into adulthood. She details how the shared tragedy changed the trajectory of their lives, how this singular moment changed their innate beings. However, because the story begins at the climax, what follows is the long-drawn resolution. Think of the film "Boyhood," which didn't have a climax and instead followed a boy through his life - that's what this book does. In doing so, this story - and these characters - could very well exist and function in the real world.
Another thing I love about Anshaw's "Carry The One" is that it doesn't answer any questions. So much of the text is left ambiguous, and in doing so the reader is able to construct - and find - their own meaning. One can develop an opinion about a character that differs from another reader, and both viewpoints will be grounded and validated within this space. Instead of telling you what you should think, Anshaw lets you decide. And that's really, really cool.
I, personally, love stories like these. However, those who enjoy the thrill and a fast-moving plot may find this book boring. But for those who love characters, love intricacies, and cherish unique plotlines, I really feel that you should give this book a chance.
"Carry The One" promises to follow around a series of characters who share a moment of tragedy. Instead of focusing on said tragedy, Anshaw follows three siblings - Nick, Carmen, and Alice - from adolescence into adulthood. She details how the shared tragedy changed the trajectory of their lives, how this singular moment changed their innate beings. However, because the story begins at the climax, what follows is the long-drawn resolution. Think of the film "Boyhood," which didn't have a climax and instead followed a boy through his life - that's what this book does. In doing so, this story - and these characters - could very well exist and function in the real world.
Another thing I love about Anshaw's "Carry The One" is that it doesn't answer any questions. So much of the text is left ambiguous, and in doing so the reader is able to construct - and find - their own meaning. One can develop an opinion about a character that differs from another reader, and both viewpoints will be grounded and validated within this space. Instead of telling you what you should think, Anshaw lets you decide. And that's really, really cool.
I, personally, love stories like these. However, those who enjoy the thrill and a fast-moving plot may find this book boring. But for those who love characters, love intricacies, and cherish unique plotlines, I really feel that you should give this book a chance.
jenhm's review against another edition
3.0
Despite a great premise and interesting characters, something is off with this book. It just doesn't quite deliver.
gweiswasser's review against another edition
3.0
Carry the One by Carol Anshaw, one of the books I picked up at The Strand a few weeks ago, came very highly recommended by a few book bloggers I respect a lot, so I picked it up with anticipation last week. I appreciate what was unique and impressive about the book, but I have to say that I didn’t like it as much as many others have.
Carry the One opens at a wedding reception in the Midwest. It’s in the wee hours of the morning, and Carmen, the bride, has just put her siblings Alice and Nick in a car driven by Nick’s stoned girlfriend Olivia and carrying a few other passengers, including Maude, a woman that Alice has just gotten involved with. Soon after setting out from the farmhouse where the wedding took place, the car strikes and kills a young girl who was returning to her house in the middle of the night. Carry the One tracks Carmen, Nick, Alice, Maude and Olivia’s lives for the next 20+ years, through their ups and downs, breakups, joys and challenges.
Anshaw is a beautiful writer, almost poetic. Her descriptions are spare but powerful, and her eye for detail and the little gestures and emotions that make up relationships is keen. Carrie at Nomad Reader compared Carry the One to The Year We Left Home and I think that’s a pretty apt comparison. Both novels track members of a family over many years, not with faithful yearly check-ins, but through vignettes and flashes of detail that together form an almost impressionist canvas of their lives and interactions.
I have tried to pinpoint where this book fell short for me. I think it was the characters themselves. Carmen is an activist who seems oddly detached from her own life, even as she gets divorced and remarried to a man with a difficult daughter. Alice, a painter, goes from relationship to relationship, caught up in passion and longing but disdainful of conventional relationships and the stability they provide. And Nick is a junkie, unable to stay off of drugs for any substantial period of time. Each of these characters thus cuts him or herself off from deeper connection to the people around them, and at times from each other. This lack of connection – the detached way that these characters floated through their lives – ultimately put a distance between me and the book as well. I am surprised by those who said they couldn’t put this book down; I had to make an effort to stay engaged with these characters and what was happening to them. It’s a testament to Anshaw’s writing that I enjoyed it as much as I did.
I also found the plot construct of the accident linking these people together forever – and indelibly impacting them – to be somewhat artificial. While I understand that it served to keep the characters from spinning off immediately in directions far from each other, I found the way the dead girl was threaded through their lives to be forced. Of course they would be impacted by what happened, but as a theme unifying the lives of these characters, it didn’t work for me.
I know that I am in the minority on this one. I just didn’t love it.
Carry the One opens at a wedding reception in the Midwest. It’s in the wee hours of the morning, and Carmen, the bride, has just put her siblings Alice and Nick in a car driven by Nick’s stoned girlfriend Olivia and carrying a few other passengers, including Maude, a woman that Alice has just gotten involved with. Soon after setting out from the farmhouse where the wedding took place, the car strikes and kills a young girl who was returning to her house in the middle of the night. Carry the One tracks Carmen, Nick, Alice, Maude and Olivia’s lives for the next 20+ years, through their ups and downs, breakups, joys and challenges.
Anshaw is a beautiful writer, almost poetic. Her descriptions are spare but powerful, and her eye for detail and the little gestures and emotions that make up relationships is keen. Carrie at Nomad Reader compared Carry the One to The Year We Left Home and I think that’s a pretty apt comparison. Both novels track members of a family over many years, not with faithful yearly check-ins, but through vignettes and flashes of detail that together form an almost impressionist canvas of their lives and interactions.
I have tried to pinpoint where this book fell short for me. I think it was the characters themselves. Carmen is an activist who seems oddly detached from her own life, even as she gets divorced and remarried to a man with a difficult daughter. Alice, a painter, goes from relationship to relationship, caught up in passion and longing but disdainful of conventional relationships and the stability they provide. And Nick is a junkie, unable to stay off of drugs for any substantial period of time. Each of these characters thus cuts him or herself off from deeper connection to the people around them, and at times from each other. This lack of connection – the detached way that these characters floated through their lives – ultimately put a distance between me and the book as well. I am surprised by those who said they couldn’t put this book down; I had to make an effort to stay engaged with these characters and what was happening to them. It’s a testament to Anshaw’s writing that I enjoyed it as much as I did.
I also found the plot construct of the accident linking these people together forever – and indelibly impacting them – to be somewhat artificial. While I understand that it served to keep the characters from spinning off immediately in directions far from each other, I found the way the dead girl was threaded through their lives to be forced. Of course they would be impacted by what happened, but as a theme unifying the lives of these characters, it didn’t work for me.
I know that I am in the minority on this one. I just didn’t love it.
bichito_feo's review against another edition
3.0
Couldn't help but love the characters in this book. Anshaw does a great job with them.
auntstacey's review against another edition
4.0
I picked this up because it was a staff recommendation at an independent bookstore (their favorite book of the year) - I have high hopes!
bookishlibrarian's review against another edition
3.0
After Carmen and Matt's wedding, a car of guests accidentally hits and kills a young girl. The book follows primarily Carmen and her siblings, Nick and Alice, in the decades that follow. While ostensibly about the guilt they carry and how that event changes their lives--Carmen is an incessant do-gooder, Alice an artist that can't seem to stop painting the young girl, and Nick a helpless addict--the whole novel frustratingly stays on the same even plane without building to anything substantial or the characters doing much but repeating the same mistakes all over again.
djrmelvin's review
2.0
Beautiful writing that almost masks a go-nowhere story. There's so much opportunity for something to happen to any of the characters who are present for a life shattering moment, but one day after finishing this I realized that not one of them went in a direction different than the one they were headed in before it happened. Maybe that's Anshaw's point, that life doesn't turn on a dime. But if that's true, what was the point of dragging the reader through all that well written angst?