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3.09 AVERAGE
3.09 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Minor: Alcoholism, Cancer, Child death, Death, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Eating disorder, Homophobia, Infidelity, Mental illness, Misogyny, Suicide, Medical content, Dementia, Grief, Car accident, Injury/Injury detail
Excellent book. In fact, the best I have read in quite some time. Writing is fluid but feels very real and relevant. The book explores what happens after a car full of partygoers in rural Wisconsin hits and kills a young girl one night and how they cope with this over the next 25 years. Set mostly in Chicago in the era from 1983 to the present, so fun to read about local and timely references.
As you can see this took me forever to finally finish. It wasn’t particularly interesting and yet I finished it anyway.
Carry the One by Carol Anshaw was an interesting book that began with one disasterous event. After Carmen's wedding, her sister Alice, her sister-in-law Maude (Alice's new lover), her brother Nick, Nick's high as a kite girlfriend, Olivia, and a straggler named Tom, drive home. . . only to hit and kill a little girl who is walking home from a sleepover at the unlikely time of 2 AM.
This event seems to cause a downward spiral in the lives of those involved. Olivia, the driver, is jailed for the accident. Nick feels terribly guilty, since he was also on a multitude of drugs and had seen the girl before they hit her but didn't speak up because he thought she wasn't real. He tries everything to make it up to Olivia, but can't maintain sobriety, which is what Olivia needs if Nick is going to be in her life.
Carmen's marriage unravels and she tries to co-parent her son the best way she knows how. Alice is an artist, in an out of success, and has an on again, off again relationship with Maude, which is very unhealthy.
Tom seems to be the only one able to deal with the incident effectively, having written a successful song about the crash.
My thoughts? I enjoyed the book but was confused by the ending. As in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, I just didn't understand the ending of Carry the One. What did I miss along the way? Am I supposed to understand the cryptic ending?
Also, the entire group is bonded together by this incident, and while I can see that their lives are spiraling out of control, I'm not sure if this incident is the cause. Carmen married Matt because she was pregnant, so it's not a huge surprise that the relationship isn't lasting. Nick was a huge drug addict before the accident, so being unable to stay sober isn't a surprise either. Alice falls into convenient relationships, and happened to be in this semi-destructive one with Maude, something they managed to start right before the accident took place.
This novel falls right in the middle for me. I enjoyed reading it but I wish the ending was more clear to me!
What are you reading this week?
Thanks for reading,
Rebecca @ Love at First Book
This event seems to cause a downward spiral in the lives of those involved. Olivia, the driver, is jailed for the accident. Nick feels terribly guilty, since he was also on a multitude of drugs and had seen the girl before they hit her but didn't speak up because he thought she wasn't real. He tries everything to make it up to Olivia, but can't maintain sobriety, which is what Olivia needs if Nick is going to be in her life.
Carmen's marriage unravels and she tries to co-parent her son the best way she knows how. Alice is an artist, in an out of success, and has an on again, off again relationship with Maude, which is very unhealthy.
Tom seems to be the only one able to deal with the incident effectively, having written a successful song about the crash.
My thoughts? I enjoyed the book but was confused by the ending. As in Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, I just didn't understand the ending of Carry the One. What did I miss along the way? Am I supposed to understand the cryptic ending?
Also, the entire group is bonded together by this incident, and while I can see that their lives are spiraling out of control, I'm not sure if this incident is the cause. Carmen married Matt because she was pregnant, so it's not a huge surprise that the relationship isn't lasting. Nick was a huge drug addict before the accident, so being unable to stay sober isn't a surprise either. Alice falls into convenient relationships, and happened to be in this semi-destructive one with Maude, something they managed to start right before the accident took place.
This novel falls right in the middle for me. I enjoyed reading it but I wish the ending was more clear to me!
What are you reading this week?
Thanks for reading,
Rebecca @ Love at First Book
Yeah, I'm tapping out on this one. I made it 70-something pages in, hoping it would get better. I hate not finishing books, but at a certain point, there are just too many books to waste my time reading bad ones.
Here's the thing: if I had liked even one thing about this, I would have continued, but there was nothing. First of all, the writing style was jerky and abrupt, and really made it hard to get into the flow of the novel. Take the first line: "So Carmen was married, just." The whole book is like that. There's something weirdly conversational and backwards about it. It's obviously a matter of personal taste and I'm sure it wouldn't bother everyone, but it drove me nuts.
Also, the timeline was virtually impossible to follow. Chapters sometimes jumped a few months, sometimes years, with little or no time marker. In some cases, you'd end up reading most of the chapter without any clue that years had been skipped. That is totally jarring and it makes it hard to anchor yourself in the story. I usually have no problem with timeline shifts and I actually generally really like that kind of narrative, but please, for the love of God, MAKE IT CLEAR HOW MUCH TIME HAS PASSED!
On the same sort of wavelength, the pov changes were sometimes incredibly subtle and hard to follow. I'm fine with pov's changing mid-chapter (as long as there are breaks), but there's a problem when the pov changes more than once in the same segment. There were times when it was legitimately difficult to figure out whose pov it was supposed to be and which character was thinking and which was being thought about. I mean, I don't even know how you get yourself into that mess.
My biggest issue, by far and away, was that I universally hated each and every one of the characters. Literally, none of them were likeable or sympathetic at all. It reminded me a lot of Dinner at the Homesick Restuarant, which I also hated (and was forced to read in school--TWICE!). Every character in that book is basically an awful person, and you follow each of them for years while they do terrible things to each other and otherwise lead totally boring lives, all the way up until the end where they continue to be basically awful people and learn nothing from their experiences. This book was very much like that, though I obviously don't know how this one turns out. Each character was totally fucked up, but not the interesting kind of fucked up. It didn't matter whose pov or what else was going on, i was continuously bored and frustrated by all of them. A weirdly disproportionate time seemed to be spent in Alice's pov, who in some ways was the most boring and annoying of all of them. If any of them had been even slightly more likeable, I might have cared a bit more as they struggled to deal with the fallout from the accident. Which, by the way, was implausible to begin with. A 10 year old girl wandering around outside in the middle of nowhere by herself and walking across back country roads at 3:00 in the morning? Oh ok.
They all seemed like teenagers, to by honest. You'd expect this kind of behavior from them, but not people in their mid-twenties whose lives have all been basically ok and without significant trauma. I mean seriously, grow up. The only character I felt bad for was the kid because he seemed basically ok and didn't deserve to be raised around these crappy people.
Let's recap: awful characters, boring plot, weird and confusing time/pov shifts, and a bizarre and obnoxious writing style. Annnnnd done.
Here's the thing: if I had liked even one thing about this, I would have continued, but there was nothing. First of all, the writing style was jerky and abrupt, and really made it hard to get into the flow of the novel. Take the first line: "So Carmen was married, just." The whole book is like that. There's something weirdly conversational and backwards about it. It's obviously a matter of personal taste and I'm sure it wouldn't bother everyone, but it drove me nuts.
Also, the timeline was virtually impossible to follow. Chapters sometimes jumped a few months, sometimes years, with little or no time marker. In some cases, you'd end up reading most of the chapter without any clue that years had been skipped. That is totally jarring and it makes it hard to anchor yourself in the story. I usually have no problem with timeline shifts and I actually generally really like that kind of narrative, but please, for the love of God, MAKE IT CLEAR HOW MUCH TIME HAS PASSED!
On the same sort of wavelength, the pov changes were sometimes incredibly subtle and hard to follow. I'm fine with pov's changing mid-chapter (as long as there are breaks), but there's a problem when the pov changes more than once in the same segment. There were times when it was legitimately difficult to figure out whose pov it was supposed to be and which character was thinking and which was being thought about. I mean, I don't even know how you get yourself into that mess.
My biggest issue, by far and away, was that I universally hated each and every one of the characters. Literally, none of them were likeable or sympathetic at all. It reminded me a lot of Dinner at the Homesick Restuarant, which I also hated (and was forced to read in school--TWICE!). Every character in that book is basically an awful person, and you follow each of them for years while they do terrible things to each other and otherwise lead totally boring lives, all the way up until the end where they continue to be basically awful people and learn nothing from their experiences. This book was very much like that, though I obviously don't know how this one turns out. Each character was totally fucked up, but not the interesting kind of fucked up. It didn't matter whose pov or what else was going on, i was continuously bored and frustrated by all of them. A weirdly disproportionate time seemed to be spent in Alice's pov, who in some ways was the most boring and annoying of all of them. If any of them had been even slightly more likeable, I might have cared a bit more as they struggled to deal with the fallout from the accident. Which, by the way, was implausible to begin with. A 10 year old girl wandering around outside in the middle of nowhere by herself and walking across back country roads at 3:00 in the morning? Oh ok.
They all seemed like teenagers, to by honest. You'd expect this kind of behavior from them, but not people in their mid-twenties whose lives have all been basically ok and without significant trauma. I mean seriously, grow up. The only character I felt bad for was the kid because he seemed basically ok and didn't deserve to be raised around these crappy people.
Let's recap: awful characters, boring plot, weird and confusing time/pov shifts, and a bizarre and obnoxious writing style. Annnnnd done.
I read this book with my book club.
From the back of the book you know something tragic is going to happen early on as you are reading. What you don't realize is all the other surprising things along the way!
Some of the characters have some very interesting lifestyles. It really made you wonder if some of the people would even still be "friends" or even continue to meet up if this even had not occurred. It was an interesting perspective into how people deal with grief and guilt.
Not a great read, but it kept my attention pretty well throughout.
A few women in my book club did not appreciate that there was a homosexual lifestyle (and a few intimate scenes) depicted. It was a bit surprising at the beginning for sure. Just as a forewarning if that matters to you.
From the back of the book you know something tragic is going to happen early on as you are reading. What you don't realize is all the other surprising things along the way!
Some of the characters have some very interesting lifestyles. It really made you wonder if some of the people would even still be "friends" or even continue to meet up if this even had not occurred. It was an interesting perspective into how people deal with grief and guilt.
Not a great read, but it kept my attention pretty well throughout.
A few women in my book club did not appreciate that there was a homosexual lifestyle (and a few intimate scenes) depicted. It was a bit surprising at the beginning for sure. Just as a forewarning if that matters to you.
I started this one, and immediately put it back down, after only a few pages. I have never done that before. I was so uneasy reading those pages and now I can say why. I need time to get to know characters, build a relationship with them, care about them, or love to hate them. Within the first few pages, these characters were thrown at me, telling me way more than I wanted to know about them and more than I was comfortable with (really really intimate details on page 3) and it was so off-putting that I immediately didn't like them and just didn't care what happened. I know I didn't give it much of a chance, but still. The premise of the book intrigued me, but I can't do this one. I'm not giving it stars only because I didn't actually read it beyond the first few pages, and a rating here would be unfair.
i get tied up in the creation of the characters more so than the actual action of the novel & anshaw seems to do the same. the car crash was not the height of action throughout the novel but each character very much so was. my copy is absolutely covered in sticky notes, my walls are pasted with pieces of this novel. beautifully crafted, beautifully presented, absolutely beautiful, through & through. MY HEART LIES HERE.
Very satisfying character development. Enjoyable writing style. Not much plot or substance though.
I liked this book. I always wondered how a tragic even has a long-term ripple effect. Anyone who knows Chicago will appreciate the familiarly with locations. Somewhat abrupt ending.