I’m really surprised at the negative reviews here. I thought the book was amazing, riveting, so much more than the surface level these reviews assume. It’s beautifully written, with vivid descriptions that brought me to those places…making me examine my own emotions, my own past errors, my own understanding of Carrie’s actions. It’s about the essence of life not being a list of ways one ‘should’ act, but the way one must—not in acts of selfishness, but in acts of need. The need to be honest, and to be fully alive. I loved it.

This book was so amazingly bland that I can’t accurately describe my feelings for it. Through the entire book I found myself hoping to finish it so that I could put it aside and start another, more interesting book. I have never in my life disliked a main character as much as I disliked Carrie Bell.

She was selfish, pure and simple. When her best friend and fiance broke his neck in a diving accident, she ran off to New York and began making something of her life. She began following her dreams and exploring her emotions. In New York, unlike her hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, she was known to care about people every now and then. Be happy every now and then. In Madison, she cared about no one, least of all herself. She abandoned her friends and her fiance.

I have absolutely no idea how she could feel so numb towards someone who was not only her lover, but her friend. The whole book amazed me. There were no surpises. No plot twists. No caring for the character. I was more interested in the tale of her friends than her own tale. It’s like watching an interesting movie through a very bland character’s eyes.

The third book on my new reading plan and I hated it. I can only hope few books like this follow. I will never again trust the New York Times Bestseller list.

wow the main character bugged me a lot.
you know how sometimes you read a book with a character who’s really really passive and you feel like screaming “DO SOMETHING!”
that’s pretty much this book.

I’m not quite sure what to think about this book. It’s a good idea for a novel, it’s interesting to explore, and yet … the most interesting parts of the book are the clothing descriptions and the sex scenes. Everyone is so massively irritating and the main characters seem kind of two-dimensional. I don’t know. It kept me reading until the very end, but I think it was because I wanted to find out if anything ever happened.