Carrie Bell is the worst person in the world. Or so she would have you think. In the gripping, carefully paced debut novel of personal epiphany, The Dive from Clausen's Pier, by O. Henry Award winner Ann Packer, Carrie's very survival is dependent upon her leaving her fiancé, even after he dives into shallow water at a Memorial Day picnic and becomes paralyzed. Things hadn't been going so well for the Madison, Wisconsin, high school and college sweethearts. Carrie knew, deep down, that she wasn't going to become Mrs. Michael Mayer. But expectations and pressure from all sides--his family, her mother, her best friend Jamie, Mike's best friend Rooster--force Carrie to shut herself up in her room and sew outfits of her own design as if in a trance. Then one night she slips out of the only universe she's ever known. Many hours later she finds herself on the doorstep of a high school classmate living in Manhattan. Carrie's adventures in the city--quirky roommates and a new romance with an older, emotionally impenetrable man--confuse her in her quest both to forgive herself and to embark on a career in fashion design. Packer writes in a convincing voice and packs a lot into this novel; she infuses Carrie with enough humanity and smarts to choose her own version of "happily ever after." --Emily Russin
レビュー:
Melissa (USA: NJ) (2007/10/16): LOVED LOVED LOVED this book. I had a hard time putting it down...Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Carolyn (USA: RI) (2008/11/26): Carrie's destructiveness takes away from my sympathy for her as a character, as does her neediness for the all-too-distant Kilroy. While I get that Kilroy is her way of punishing herself, that relationship stretches on far too long before she returns to her home to figure her stuff out. What is more baffling is what she stays for doesn't make any more sense: an "only" friendship with Mike, and her friend Jamie, and her mom-- all relationships which an adult person could have carried on while in another city becoming his or her own person. Dropping her design career, her dream, is yet another enigma-- as if somehow she bought Kilroy's notion that there's nothing to figuring out what you want to do for life. His nihilism is external, hers internal and hidden even from herself, as she disintegrates everything in her life, and only by the forgiveness of others, manages to keep relationships. Ironically her mom is a therapist, because I would certainly give Carrie (and her boyfriend Kilroy) a probable personality disorder. Carrie was Carrie long before the accident, we just didn't know her as a reader before the accident, and her reactions spoke to her personality as well as her inability to stick-- to *anything*. As Elizabeth Bishop said, "the art of losing isn't hard to master"-- and Carrie certainly makes an art of it.
