Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Carry the One: A Novel
    Carry the One: A Novel
    Carry the One: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    Carry the One: A Novel

    Written by Carol Anshaw

    Narrated by Renee Raudman

    3.5/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Carry the One begins in the hours following Carmen's
    wedding reception, when a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy
    guests accidently hits and kills a girl on a dark, country road. For the
    next twenty-five years, those involved, including Carmen and her
    brother and sister, connect and disconnect and reconnect with each other
    and their victim. As one character says, "When you add us up, you
    always have to carry the one."Through friendships and love
    affairs; marriage and divorce; parenthood, holidays, and the modest
    tragedies and joys of ordinary days, Carry the One shows how one
    life affects another and how those who thrive and those who
    self-destruct are closer to each other than we'd expect. Deceptively
    short and simple in its premise, this novel derives its power and appeal
    from the author's beautifully precise use of language; her sympathy for
    her very recognizable, flawed characters; and her persuasive belief in
    the transforming forces of time and love.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 6, 2012
    ISBN9781452675855
    Author

    Carol Anshaw

    Carol Anshaw is the author of Aquamarine and Seven Moves, both Lambda Award finalists. She has won the Carl Sandburg Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, she reviews books for major newspapers nationwide.

    Related to Carry the One

    Related audiobooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Carry the One

    3.5/5

    263 ratings37 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Carol Anshaw is a perpetually underrated writer, in my opinion. This novel isn’t even one of her best, but it’s pretty darn good. Young people on the way home from a wedding get into a car accident that will affect all of their lives. Mix in some progressive politics, lesbian perspective and great Chicago locations, and you have classic Anshaw.
    • 5/5
      I really liked Carol Anshaw's style of writing. This book held my interest throughout. I did think, however, that it had a bizarre ending. Will probably read some of her other books. (On loan from Cindy.)
    • 5/5
      Anshaw is a genius at pulling together family and friend strands into a united whole world for the reader, penetrating the depths of all her characters, even the minor ones. In this novel, we meet three siblings - Alice, Nick, and Carmen - immediately after a disastrous drunk and drugged-driving accident, when a little girl is hit and run over following Carmen's wedding. With the tragedy opening the novel, we follow what becomes of those who were in the car and the newlyweds. Alice becomes a famous artist stuck in a bad groove with her flighty, ambitious girlfriend, Carmen's husband eventually divorces her to run off with a missionary, and Nick, an astronomer, has a secret about the accident which sends him over the line into addiction. As the siblings age, the accident's impact reaches into their lives with amazing force, and the reader will ache for their subsequent good and bad decisions.Quotes: "She was a terrible actress, wooden. Often she appeared stunned by the other actor's line.""It was not a good situation when the same person provided the pain and the analgesic.""I don't think he's terribly interested in a tragedy so big that everyone else is in on it. He's a tragedy snob."
    • 4/5
      On way home from Carmen's wedding, siblings and their friends/lovers hit and kill a young girl. This novel traces their stories -- relationships, careers, addictions, etc. -- and the ongoing effect the accident has on Carmen and the five people in the car. The characters are well developed and complex; the writing is strong. The novel shows how one event can change your perspective on life, and how different people are affected differently by the same event. I'd like to read more by this author.
    • 2/5
      This is a story about a cast of characters and what happens in their lives after a common tragedy. Not sure if I want to give this two or three stars. I had very high expectations, so I was let down by the lack of emotion it brought out in me. But if I hadn't have heard the hype, I might be more apt to have enjoyed it simply for what it was, and rate it with three.
    • 4/5
      Begins in the hours following Carmen's wedding reception, when a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests accidentally hits and kills a girl on a dark country road. For the next 25 years, those involved, including Carmen and her brother and sister, craft their lives in response to this single tragic moment. As one character says, "When you add us up, you always have to carry the one."
    • 3/5
      I was eagerly anticipating this book, but it was just okay. The writing is fine, nothing spectacular, but the characters' voices seemed too flat and undifferentiated to me. And although the author tells us many times about the impact that the precipitating event had on the characters' lives, we don't really see it.
    • 2/5
      This book was okay. It didn't suck me in like most books I like. It starts out with a wedding between Carmen and Matt. Their sisters Maude and Alice get in a car with Alice and Carmen's brother Nick, who is high and his girlfriend Olivia who is also high and gets behind the wheel. They soon hit a girl and kill her. The book then goes through there lives over the next 20 years. You don't really grasp time passing along unless you catch an age of someone or a major event. Or even the book said "2 years later" other then that it was an "oh, we've jumped ahead."

      I was expecting this book to be more about how the death of the young girl affects their lives and how one incident can change someone for life but they all were already on the paths they were headed before the accident.

      The book is a little boring and was just a look at the life of these messed up people. It's pretty much focused on Carmen, Alice and Nick and Alice is the main character featured. Not a bad book, I've just read better.
    • 4/5
      Very well done in terms of writing style and choices, and the concept was interesting. This book follows several people who all feel that they participated in the accidental death of a child. The single night of her death haunts them for twenty years; each handles that event in different ways.
      It was very difficult over the first 100 pages and even at points later to remember who was who, though. I struggled to keep track of the individuals, their histories, and the tracks of their lives. That was particularly annoying as I got further into the book. But in the end, I was glad to have read this.
    • 4/5
      Joy's review: What a thought and emotion provoking book! What is forgiveness? Are some things unforgiveable? What do we 'owe' our family? Can events tie us together forever? All these deep questions AND it's very well written; Anshaw has great descriptive power.
    • 4/5
      This novel is structured in a similar way to David Nicholls’ “One Day” – a story that moves forward in time with each chapter, and captures the characters at a particular moment in their lives. In this case however there is a wider cast of characters, and the time leaps are less precise. Any chronological pointers you have to hang on to for dear life for they are doled out sparingly. I did find the brevity of the sections hard to deal with – I found myself wanting to know more, for these were all interesting and well rounded characters. What does help however is the excellent writing – here is an author who extracts high work rate from every word.I would perhaps have liked a bit more detail about what people looked like earlier on in the story as it was hard to separate them without this basic information, but it’s a minor gripe. This is a very intelligent and well written investigation of the business of guilt, addiction, family, relationships and lesbianism in startlingly tactile form. It’s not quite “One Day” but it’s close.
    • 1/5
      I don't even know where to start with this book. For a short story, it was painfully long. I think the elements of the story would have worked better in a better format possibly. I just didn't care for how the story bounced around. I couldn't stand how in one chapter I was reading about this time frame and the very next chapter could jump anywhere from 1-5 years away and it didn't express that until at least a few paragraphs into the chapter. And the ending...what the heck kind of ending was that? It kind of came out of nowhere and it wasn't that of a great surprise ending. I would have been happy without the whole last chapter, or at least for it to have gone a completely different direction!

      The characters weren't the most likable characters in a book. I understand that the storyline is that of a tough nature, but it was so hard to fall in love with any of the characters!

      I do think that this story does have potential and does pull at some heart strings, however, I just couldn't stay interested and make myself happy about having to continue to read it!

      This just wasn't a book for me! I get the point behind it, really I do, and I think written differently, it could be brilliant!
    • 3/5
      This book has a similar issue to Seating Arrangements, not sure why I kept reading but I did. Unlike Seating Arrangements, I liked these characters -- especially Carmen and Alice. I just wish there had been more there, I kept expecting things to happen and nothing really did. Still a good book, but not one of my favorites.
    • 4/5
      In the small hours of the morning on an otherwise deserted country road, a carload of wedding celebrants, under the influence of alcohol and drugs, crashes into a ten year old girl, killing her. One life is ended by the impact, but the ramifications of the accident echo and multiply in the years that follow in the lives of each of the car’s occupants. For one it means prison. For the others, their guilt and their punishment takes various forms. But for each there can be little doubt that one event will come to dominate the rest of their lives.Carol Anshaw follows the lives of three siblings over the course of the next twenty-five years: Carmen, whose wedding the others had attended; Alice, who was in the back seat of the car with her lover, Maude; and Nick, who was in the front passenger seat. Each chapter focuses on a different sibling, returning again and again over the years. Swooping between a regal third person, where the course of a character’s life can be announced magisterially, and a close third person narration from virtually inside the head of the character, Anshaw invites us to feel their anguish, doubt, and disappointment. Writing in a lush, lyric mode, she brings her principal characters viscerally to life. So much so that they feel hauntingly, even distressingly, real.In their separate ways, each character must deal with the fallout from that initial horrific accident. For Alice, a burgeoning artist, the life that might have been for the dead girl begins to play itself out in her paintings. For Carmen, her marriage disintegrates, but she finds solace in her young son. For Nick, the downward spiral is unrelenting. But the effects go far beyond these principal characters.Certainly an impressive and emotional novel that must be highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Careless accident -- but does it really ruin everyone's lives, or would they have ruined them anyway?
    • 3/5
      I don't know what to say about this book. The blurb and numerous comments by authors and other reviewers in the preface of the novel made me think I was in for a good read.It begins dramatically enough.....a laid back wedding reception, drunk and stoned guests who get into a car to drive home. Sadly, they knock down and kill a ten year old girl and this apparently shapes the rest of their lives, as you would expect it to.We follow the main characters for the next twenty five years through ups and downs, but I didn't get the impression that the ghastly accident had affected them too much. One is an artist, and she paints the girl as if she were growing up and as she thinks she may look through those stages of her life. Aside from that, there isn't too much reference and the actual driver of the car that night barely gets a mention.The writing is competent, but I found the form a little stylised and almost gave the impression of trying to be too clever. The novel dips after the accident and doesn't pick up until near the end of the book.A disppointment really and I was loooking for more.
    • 2/5
      The “one” purportedly being carried in this novel is a 10-year-old girl, killed by a car of guests leaving a wedding reception in 1983. The guests include Alice and Nick, sister and brother of Carmen, the pregnant bride. Years later, when the car’s occupants find themselves together again, one of them comments, “When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.”But, in fact, only peripheral characters are affected significantly by the girl’s death. Carmen exhibits no guilt over letting her obviously impaired brother and sister drive away in the middle of the night. After the event, Alice’s toxic and mostly sexual relationship with Maude continues unabated. Nick is intelligent enough to do something brilliant with his life but his only real goal remains getting high. Memories of the incident surface sporadically, particularly in Alice’s paintings, but after twenty-five years, the siblings are exactly the same people they might have been if the accident never occurred. Carol Anshaw’s ability to write insightful, sharp dialogue and evocative description is never in question. But her skill in crafting a sentence is wasted on self-absorbed, unrealistic, and repetitive characters whose only purpose is to carry on with their meaningless lives. Unless Anshaw’s intent is demonstrating the destructive power of narcissism, she misses the mark.
    • 4/5
      Incredibly well written........thought provoking. Would definitely recommend. I want to read more by her. Loved her writing.
    • 2/5
      I was expecting this novel to move me in some way. I was expecting to read about a family coming to grips with a tragedy of their own making, seeking a way to move on with their lives in the wake of their poor choices that ultimately took an innocent life. Instead, I read a rather ho-hum tale of 3 siblings (Carmen, Nick and Alice) and their rather unexciting paths to adulthood. While the author attempted to weave Casey (the young girl killed by the group's drunk driving accident) into the story and make it seem as though the three adults were struggling with her memory every day, her inclusion felt more like an afterthought. The novel is structured rather bizarrely, with frenetic jumps among people, places and times. I didn't find the characters to be particularly moving, nor their lives or struggles to be realistic or thought-provoking. All in all, this book was a bit of a disappointment, despite Anshaw's occasionally exquisite use of language.
    • 4/5
      I really liked the idea of this book: an accident involving lots of drunk/stoned people in a car that hits and kills a young girl. Technically, only the driver is guilty by law, but the others carry their own guilt. No one made good decisions that night. Each of the characters takes away a bit of the dead girl that night and each deals with her presence in their lives in different ways. Anshaw paints a vivid portrait of the accident's impact on the characters' lives. Not only how they are individually altered, but also how the shared experience shapes their interactions with each other. The author is adept at handling a multitude of characters - all were interesting and individualized so I never was confused about who was who or why they made the choices they did. And the paths the characters lives took were all believable and understandable. For me, the only downfall was that I didn't like the characters. To the one they were too self-centered and felt cold. So, I never really connected emotionally to the story.Bottom line: a well written and enjoyable story with less than likable (to me) characters. I'd definitely read another book by Carol Anshaw.
    • 5/5
      ***This was an advanced readers copy, so final printing may differ from review.A wedding. Too much booze. Too much drugs. And a long drive home. When a young girl is killed, hit by a car, bounced from the windshield, and lies dead by the side of the road, each passenger, and the driver of the car carries a bit of the dead girl away.Guilt harbors within, and each require the others just to survive. An elite club if you will.This is an excellent story of a violent death and the mad race to try to outrun its shadows. Spanning several years, it examines love, obsession, siblings, political convictions, the struggles of an artist, drug addicton, and homosexuality.This book seaks to the heart. I didn't want to put it down!I give this book Five Stars and a big Thumbs Up!****DISCLOSURE: This book was provided by Amazon Vine in exchange for an independent and non-biased review.
    • 5/5
      This is my first Carol Anshaw book and I thought it was excellent. It is always interesting to see reviews and it is inevitable that people that give bad reviews don't like the characters or are looking for a plot when the book is a character study. Bottom line is that the writing was great. Good humor and although the characters were tightly drawn as being liberal, artistic, and addictive, the book was interesting and I recommend it. Good use of history and how the backdrop of events impacted the characters. The accident was a constant that was always out there but it didn't overwhelm everyone except for Nick. I look forward to reading more books by Carol Anshaw.
    • 3/5
      It was an okay book, not my favorite ever, but not bad either. Some of it was quite intense, and some of it uh... well, it was too flower-y for me, not to mention the small fact that at the beginning there were so many characters introduced all at once, so it got a bit overwhelming.Still, despite the ton and a half of characters, most of them were interesting and different. Not all cut from the same cloth that's for sure. A solid three star book.Also, I usually don't care what format it's in, but the copy that I won had a nice heft to it that isn't always apparent these days, even with hardbacks.
    • 3/5
      I'm always surprised when I read or hear from a reader that they didn't "like" the characters. Characters can be well written and interesting without being likable. In fact, characters can be boring because they are boring. I liked the concept of the book and found it well written. Powerful events shape different people in different ways.
    • 3/5
      I initially had trouble being interested in the characters - as presented - a couple of a siblings, belonging to a couple of families are involved in a car accident that leaves a young girl dead. Missing their back stories? Thinking the book would be more of a thriller?When I got hooked, I was HOOKED.The accident remains mostly in the background, but always there. Anshaw crosses decades deftly in advancing the life stories of the main characters. She does all the right things to allow the reader to NOT feel like she is jumping around haphazardly. Rather, she drops into their lives with enough subtle clues to tell the reader exactly what is going on and why.I'm not sure if I should blame the author or my preconceptions for feeling like the novel was a slow starter, but that's why I gave it three stars, rather than four. Reminded me a LOT of Without a Backward Glance by Kate Veitch, which I enjoyed a bit more than Carry the One.
    • 2/5
      Carry The One is a story about a group of people who leave a wedding reception one night and end up killing a little girl on a dark country road. this changes all their lives. i only gave this book 2 stars because I found the book boring and the characters unlikeable. The only one who had their life changed would be Olivia who was driving the car that night. The rest were superficial. i really wanted to like this book but just couldn't.
    • 4/5
      I'd read rave reviews, and loved her other books, so I was excited to read this. Unfortunately I was disappointed, though I'm not quite sure why. The characters just didn't grab me; I wasn't interested in their stories; the writing was just okay. Good but not great.
    • 4/5
      Really interesting and unusual book. It's supposedly about an accident early in the story, but it's really about different forms of addiction, perhaps springing from the accident. The characters were expertly drawn, the narrative had a certain wry humor, and the romance was steamy. I'd definitely be interested in seeing what she writes next.
    • 5/5
      This book should make no. 1 for best book 2012. I am not sure what made it so compelling. Maybe it was the simple event and how it impacts people's lives or maybe it was the walk through recent history.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book although it was a bit hard to keep all the characters straight and their relationships to each other. In the beginning I wasn't sure if Jean was a friend or a sister. Turns out she was a friend of the sister. I didn't love the characters like I sometimes do but the author did a great job pacing the novel. Each chapter moves the story along deftly, sometimes in years and sometimes much less. I have paraphrased my favorite line from the book: "The past is resistant to revision." I love that! I also thought the last chapter was perfect! To end the book with another character would have been wrong.