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.
