Carry the One

In Carry The One Carol Anshaw presents her reading audience with a very ambitious fourth novel...one which spans from a 1983 Wisconsin wedding through the 2008 Election as it chronicles a Chicago family thrown off balance by a fatal accident.

This story explores how the lives of three siblings are affected after a fatal freak accident, that ends the life of 10 year old Casey Redman late one night on a dark dirt road with Nick's drugged out girlfriend Olivia behind the wheel.

The reason I accepted this selection from the Publisher for a read/review was because the last sentence of the first chapter really caught my attention - `...a jumble of knees and elbows, and then her face, frozen in surprise, eyes wide open-huge on the other side of the windshield.' - It held the promise of a thrilling and interesting read.

What I found within the two hundred and sixty nine page novel was; the (key) characters are rather tragic sheepish souls wondering aimlessly through their own lives, whose relationships are forged in grief and guilt. The storytelling is simple but is considered to be well crafted. The readers will follow the characters as they go through friendships and love affairs; growing up and finding success; marriage and divorce; parenthood, and the tragedies and joys of ordinary days.

There's Alice a basically sound lesbian that has a deep seated obsession for Maude, is also a gifted artist competing with her egocentric father; loving judgmental Carmen a political activist and then there's their brother, Nick, a once brilliant astronomer - he may be one of the most interesting characters in this tale, but that may largely be due to his constant drug induced state of mind ,he later swears off drugs in order to win back Olivia after she's released from prison, however his addiction to drugs and alcohol have an even firmer grip on him than super glue on an eyelash. It is through Nick's drug dependence that readers are able to see how degraded a talented person can become, and how eventually a family can become as equally exasperated with the user because of it.

As for the title it comes from Alice, who says: "Because of the accident, we're not just separate numbers. When you add us up, you always have to carry the one."

The author's poetic prose is rather outstanding as she casually writes about these characters without the benefit of any real action - which will keep some readers turning the pages in search of, as they are fall witness to Anshaw's exceptional gift as a wordsmith and the comfort she maintains while utilizing her extensive vocabulary with words such as coalesce (amorphous, fatuous, confluence) with ease and relevance. Nevertheless, I found the story to be rather dry - then again, that is perhaps the writer's intended goal, considering she is telling a story of the ordinary days of a rather ordinary family following an extra ordinary event - the most exciting and entertaining aspect of this read was held hostage within the first few chapters.

My final thoughts, I wanted and needed more zest, at least something that would propel me to want to vigorously flip through the pages, fall in love with the characters and be engaged by the story, alas Carry The One did not carry me through those various stages of interest as I'd hoped. And the book's abrupt ending did not conjure up a sense of satisfaction or the desired anticipation of more.

Other reviewers have already noted the major flaws with this book. First, the overarching event in the book (a child being hit by a car) is basically relegated to a footnote in the story. We are supposed to believe that the various characters have been impacted irreversibly by this accident, but there is little in their personal stories to indicate this. Nick has drug problems before the accident; Carmen's marriage is not based on much so its dissolution comes as no surprise. Alice's obsession with Maude begins before the accident - their ongoing difficulties do not appear to have anything to do with the accident either. The end of the book implies that somehow all is forgiven, but why should it be? In general, the characters are not particularly likeable, nor does the reader have much invested in any of them. The same is true of the child's parents, who appear so briefly that it is difficult to summon much sympathy for them either. Overall, a poorly conceived concept and an even poorer execution.

Carry the One starts with the action right away. The aftermath of the accident is extremely realistic and shakes the lives of the 20-somethings involved. In spite of following the characters for 25 years following the accident, I never really felt drawn by them. The relationship just hadn't been formed between myself and any of the characters, so I found myself going along for the ride, not living the experience as though I was there, too. All characters have their downfalls and shortcomings, but I feel Anshaw highlighted those more with these characters and didn't highlight their "good side" enough, if at all for some of them. The storyline itself was fantastically original and exciting, but Anshaw definitely fell short in character development.

I recommend this novel for anyone who does not need to feel an extreme bond with characters in a novel, but is looking for a pretty decent storyline.

For a more complete review of the novel, please visit my blog post at [...]

I really liked the premise of the novel..."Carry the One." The idea that because of this horrific accident (a car accident coming home from a wedding wherein a young girl gets killed) each of the friends are forever intertwined. I thought it was going to be a book about your friends knowing you better than you know yourself...hence the carry the one. It wasn't, at least, I didn't think it was. The lives of the friends weren't nearly as intertwined as I expected them to be. In fact some of the relationships were cliched (like Maude who can't stand to be around her partner after said accident, but then returns to her two years later because she can't stand to be apart from her because of the accident *yawn*). Anyway, yeah. I thought the pace was awfully slow as well. The book is just OK. It's certainly not bad, but it doesn't deliver on the imaginative premise.

I am always looking for books that have interesting narrative schemes or present the story in a unique way. Carry the One seemed perfect on both counts. The story is about four people who are driving home when they hit a young girl in the road and she dies. the four people in the car are changed forever by the event. While some over-function, others sink into a life of alcohol and sex. Despite the different directions that their lives take, they all remain tied to each other because of the incident.

What was most interesting, was how each of the characters viewed the situation and was changed by it. It just proves how one decision and one minute can change anyone's life. Additionally, sometimes it's not what we do that defines us but how we handle the repercussions from what we do.

Celebration turns to tragedy as one moment in time changes the lives of everyone in the car. Everyone, including the driver of the car, Olivia, had been at Carmen and Matt's wedding. A long, happy but tiring day, everyone was worn out, a little drunk, and a little stoned. When the girl appeared in the road, the car strikes her and changes everything in an instant for everyone involved. The novel is about the years that follow, and the effects of the accident on the lives of the driver and passengers. It was a great novel, with some lessons on life and consequences that really stuck with me, and that I would like to be able to keep. The accident was a burden that all involved carried in a different way. Well written and great character development.

I have always wondered about the lives of people after a life altering event. You read about them in the paper and unless you know them you never find out how it shaped the course of their lives. This book gives you an idea of how things can go. I really like the way the characters were developed in the book. I felt as though I really got to know them all and I cared about what happened in their lives. The book for me was a page turner, I really needed to find out what would happen with the characters and that kept me flipping pages late into the night. I think this is a great book with spectacular detail. If you are looking for a cliche thriller/mystery this is not for you. This is a smart work of fiction.

I was intrigued by the subject/plot of this book... the author manages to portray the strength of the event on all the characters involved... they are bound together by this horrible incident... however, i had a hard time relating to any of the characters. they were all very different... there was a connection between them, but i was unsympathetic to any of them...this left me a bit disappointed. Compared to Nicholas Sparks or Nora Roberts books where i am crying or rooting for the characters i didn't feel satisfied. Author rotates from perspective of various characters which kept it moving along. Not one of my favorites.

I wanted to like this book. Examining the impacts of a tragic event on individuals and relationships several years in the future. An unconventional narrative structure that allows the reader to see glimpses into different periods in the characters' lives. It sounds like a book with potential, but it just didn't come together for me. Somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the way through, I just couldn't motivate myself to pick it up anymore.

The difficulty with managing multiple story lines is that each has to be really engaging if the book isn't going to lose the reader between the bits that are actually interesting. This task becomes even harder when you take those story lines and stretch them out over multiple years, so that the reader is always playing catch up with the characters. Although there was one character, I would have kept reading for if I could have read just her story, the others just didn't give me enough reason to keep going until I got to the next section about the character I liked.

I really wanted to like this book - its premise sounded interesting - lives are forever changed after an accident after a wedding. But in less than three hundred pages, the rather epic scope of covering thirty years in the lives of three siblings and their assorted friends, lovers, etc fell flat. The meandering plot with abrupt shifts in time, setting and character made it difficult to connect with any of the characters, and made the book feel rather dull. I genuinely didn't care for even one single character - well, except for the dogs, I suppose. Those felt more three dimensional than the one-sided, one-dominant-trait caricatures that made up the human cast. We had Alice the Charming Artist, Carmen the Bleeding Heart, Nick the Druggie, Olivia the Reformed, Maude the Beauty, Tom the Selfish Jerk, Jean the Unformed, Heather the YA Rebel... None of them grew or developed beyond their one trademark.

Not even the Chicago setting redeemed the book for me! Though many place names were authentic and correctly described - there was a great opportunity to show beyond a national political stage how time had passed with such a dynamic city as the backdrop, but unfortunately Anshaw did not take advantage of that. Her Chicago (and I live in one of the neighborhoods frequently mentioned) was not mine - and had a surprisingly New York vibe rather than a Chicago one. The constant stream of politics bothered me as well. I really wasn't expecting a book so steeped in political opinion. I would have preferred to not be bombarded with political opinions in the guise of "literary" fiction. It was a book about awful people, where nothing really happened to show them grow or develop (for the better or worse) over the course of thirty years. I felt like I wasted my evening reading this, and I regret the time spent finishing it.

What I loved best about this novel were the perfect sentences, so many of them complete stories in themselves. This is a savoring read. Lots of humor and dead-on accurate characterizations. Lots of heart.

This book was interesting. In the beginning, a tragedy occurs after a very happy event. The book covers the next 25 years and how everyone involved handled what happened. Sometimes being strong is closely related to giving up.

After a tragic accident , the lives of many individuals is forever altered due to that accident.
The author takes us on an incredible journey of how one accident can impact so many others , close and not so close.
Intrigued by the book , I was compelled to finish it in one sitting. Moving from room to room , and chair to chair , I was able to accomplish this."Carry The One" will remain in my collection for future re-evaluations.

The only interesting thing that happens in this book is the accident. There is nothing of note that occurs after that. It's the story of three siblings and some others who are supposedly impacted by the death of a young girl that they hit with their car. There isn't much to it. One of the siblings is an addict all his life, the other one is an artist but the deepest impact on her seems to be her broken heart over a lost lesbian lover. The other one is used to push a deeply liberal agenda and bash anyone who doesn't believe in it. That must be why the New York Times loved it. It's completely boring. Nothing really happens. Don't waste your money.

With no complaints about the writer's talent in creating characters and a world that is both accessible and real for a reader, I give this book only two stars for being lesbian porn without any warnings in the description or the back matter. Filled with cross-dressers, drug addicts, and drunks, the cast is well carved but so morose that there was no one to actually care about. Every character is static, ugly, selfish, and twisted by their personal brand of avarice. I'm sure there is a market for this kind of work, but without caveats, what sounds like a gripping story idea - party revelers driving on a dark road kill a small child and must deal with their guilt for the rest of their lives - falls apart for me with having to be witness up close and personal to a sexual encounter between two women. It's not the gender bending that bothers me, it was that neither of them knew the other, they shared no feelings other than lust, no emotion other than selfishness, and no caring about each other except for having a good 'lay.' I felt offended not at their sexuality but at their banality, for the 'love' was nothing more than any one night stand pickup in a sleazy bar or as happens too often, during a wedding reception. There is no sympathy shown for either the parents or the child run down by a doped up fool behind the wheel, designated driver because the rest of the 'friends' were busy playing sex games. There's not even much concern for the friend arrested at the scene and hauled away. By about a third of the way through the pages, I quit reading. Carry the One should be called Caring for None.

The story sounded promising at first until I actually started reading. I admit I couldn't finish the novel, but my impression of the first 50 or 60 pages hasn't changed, and probably won't change. I skimmed the remainder.

So a bunch of folks get in an accident and kill a girl. The story is about the rest of their lives and living with the guilt. Only it doesn't really come across that way. And there are several other glaring issues with the novel as well.

First and foremost is that the characters are flat, unrealistic, and unlikable. The three siblings seem to go along and rarely ever have have a believable and realistic sense of guilt. Instead the guilt comes in flashes and then it gets too sappy then to bounce back to non-guilty living again. I think that may be what happens to folks in these situations, but I actually like the old Russian and British novel style of guilt, it becomes all consuming and taints every aspect of the characters' lives. Even some older American authors wrote this well (Poe?).

Sadly the writing style is just terrible. Often adjectives are confusing, and it seems the author added many in the nature of creating abstracts and metaphors where completely unnecessary.

Alas, the prose is childish and unrefined. Sentences tend to run on. Also are many repetitive sentences (He went to... He went to... He walked to... He said... Yes, how many times can you start a sentence the same way in a paragraph?). The author also equivocates quite a bit in her writing.

It reads as a high school student's first novel. It will appeal to some because of the nature of the story, but it's merely poorly written at best. Read the excerpt provided on this site and determine for yourself.

I remember reading about this book when it was first published last year. I remember seeing fantastic reviews on it & I was so excited when I was able to pick up a copy at a library book sale.

Sadly, my expectations were not met.

I liked the concept of the book - after a girl is killed in a drunk/drug driving accident the driver and all the passengers "carry" the girl with them throughout their lives. I imagine that's what would really happen - something horrible that you couldn't fix, you'd never forget & that would always affect you.

The big problem for me was the characters. I found them unlikeable & it bothered me that they mostly keep making the same types of choices they did before the accident. I also didn't like how the story jumped years (and viewpoints) between chapters. I found that the time gaps sometimes made the story hard to follow.

I just didn't like it.

She started with an interesting premise, but the story was not well executed. The writing was too light and cliche ridden for the seriousness of the topic.

I think the central questions were: How do you go on after taking part in a tragic death and how is your life shaped by it?

These people stumbled on as we all do and didn't seem terribly changed by it (except possibly Nick but he appears to already be an addict at the start of the book).

Pointless and not well written or told.

Took awhile to digest this one. Had such high hopes. I had known it would be a different book, based on a child getting hit by a car. I really thought the cover said a lot, with so little.

From the start, I had trouble keeping track of everyone, and really, how do you move on after this sort of tragedy? We get to see every few years what the 3 main characters were doing, but I just didn't get the fact that there really wasn't anything to do with the beginning.

At least for myself. I was looking for more of something that I never got. I had a hard time connecting myself to any of the characters; Carmen and her family.

Maybe you had a different experience. I would love to hear if so!

This was a moving and beautifully written story, following the lives of several characters for years after a terrible accident. I felt like I got to know each character in depth, and cared about them a lot by the end of the book. To me, it was very touching and very true to life.

The novel is so much more than its harrowing premise. Lives are impacted by a singular tragedy but it is the power of the writing and storytelling that transforms the reader. Where grief is concerned, there are no easy answers but the story allows for the possibility of redemption. I was very moved by this story and recommend it most highly.

The novel is so much more than its harrowing premise. Lives are impacted by a singular tragedy but it is the power of the writing and storytelling that transforms the reader. Where grief is concerned, there are no easy answers but the story allows for the possibility of redemption. I was very moved by this story and recommend it most highly.

I found this book hard to read and somewhat dreary. There is an accident where a little girl is killed right after a wedding. Everyone in the car was drunk or stoned. The book deals with these people who were in the car at the time over several years. Not one of my favorites!

I loved the way the characters changed. It was always surprising, and that's high praise, because you can usually see developments coming way before they get there. This book was beautifully written, witty, compassionate. On the whole, a delight.

The premise of this book sounds wonderful! But I couldn't finish it no matter how I tried. I found it to be trite and it was downright boring. It seemed to me that the only thing the author really cared about was creating sex scenes. Extremely graphic Lesbian sex scenes. Not that I have anything against lesbians - to each their own, or sex for that matter, I love sex! But there was too much of it going on in this book and it felt gratuitous, as if the author was merely trying to express her newly explored Lesbian feelings. I wasn't happy reading such graphic sex scenes what felt like every few pages. There was also a lot of drug usage and really heavy bad language. This is one book where I feel the blurb was way off it's mark. I feel duped into wanting to read it, because it really didn't feel like the kind of book I was expecting. Might be great for some, but not my cup of tea.

I know that low rated reviews are likely to get bad rap here on the store and I really do try to give high rated reviews as often as I can but I cannot lie and rate this book higher than I believe it's due. I had gotten this book in the hopes of loving it and being able to give it a rave review. Sadly, I wish I hadn't gotten this book so I wouldn't feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. But, it is what it is. I didn't like it and could not force myself to finish.

This book was stumbling, gratuitously graphic (lesbian sex) and I finally had to put it down. I hate reading books that have graphic, unnecessary sex of any kind. It just gets in the way of the story which was disjointed and boring at best. I couldn't finish it. No matter how I tried, I couldn't muddle my way through the lack of movement for the characters and honestly, the characters were so dysfunctional, they weren't believable.

The description for this book looked very good both on the store and in magazines but once I started reading it, I was not interested. It was nothing like I had expected it to be. The characters are boring and the book is dirty which I did not expect. I do not enjoy anything dirty so I especially don't want to spend my time reading it. Not for me, cannot recommend this read.

I bought this book based off the critics reviews on CNN and having read it, I must say, I'd like a refund. Like another reviewer had said the title had really nothing to do with the book, unless Maude was to Alice her "carrying the one." To me that was the driving point of the book-that and Nick's drug addiction. If a reader feels like wasting a few hours of their life this is one of those books to go to. There was some dialogue, which was okay, but the author made too many quasi-pithy one liners for my taste.

I just didn't enjoy these characters...had no empathy for them whatsoever. Couldn't wait to finish the book and even thought of putting it down midway. I fought my way to the end and promptly donated it to the library.

The premise of this book sounds wonderful! But I couldn't finish it no matter how I tried. I found it to be trite and it was downright boring. It seemed to me that the only thing the author really cared about was creating sex scenes. Extremely graphic Lesbian sex scenes. Not that I have anything against lesbians - to each their own, or sex for that matter, I love sex! But there was too much of it going on in this book and it felt gratuitous, as if the author was merely trying to express her newly explored Lesbian feelings. I wasn't happy reading such graphic sex scenes what felt like every few pages. There was also a lot of drug usage and really heavy bad language. This is one book where I feel the blurb was way off it's mark. I feel duped into wanting to read it, because it really didn't feel like the kind of book I was expecting. Might be great for some, but not my cup of tea.

I know that low rated reviews are likely to get bad rap here on the store and I really do try to give high rated reviews as often as I can but I cannot lie and rate this book higher than I believe it's due. I had gotten this book in the hopes of loving it and being able to give it a rave review. Sadly, I wish I hadn't gotten this book so I wouldn't feel like I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. But, it is what it is. I didn't like it and could not force myself to finish.