I felt like I had known any one of these people. Still, she moves toCarrie Bell feels the pull of a new life awaiting her outside her Wisconsin hometown. It's a thoughtful and nuanced exploration of what it would be like to be about to break up with someone, and then something tragic happens and you feel like you can't. Review The Dive From Clausen's Pier. The Dive from Clausen's Pier is a very well done, well written story of 23 year old Carrie Bell, a young woman from Madison, Wisconsin. The character Kilroy talks about "hard" art (Picasso) and "soft" art (Matisse) and certainly Packer's is the former. So I stopped reading those books.While this isn't classic literature, I was touched by the book. Book Review: “The Dive from Clausen’s Pier” by Ann Packer. However, it is this accident that serves as the catalyst to jog Carrie into actively questioning who she is, considering what place home and loyalty to family and friends will play in her life, and perhaps most importantly, figuring out how much of herself she owes to the people she loves.In her first novel, Ann Packer, whose short stories have appeared in Life isn't clear-cut and doesn't proceed according to plan or pattern, and the author effectively communicates this through her protagonist's interior dialogue and external conversations.

The protagonist kept having all these realizations and experiences and stuff that all just seemed really obvious and banal to me. I felt doomed to a life without personal growth. Finishing Ann Packer's The Dive From Clausen's Pier is at once an immense relief and an immense loss. I found myself totally involved in what Carrie, the narrator of this novel, was going to do with her life.This is one of those books that really shouldn't be that involving but really is--at least it was for me. Her relationship with her fiance Mike is boring her, and she wants to see the world and learn who she is. Ironically, a Google search did inform me that it has had a second life as an honest-to-goodness Lifetime movie (or maybe it was Oxygen; I wasn't paying that close of attention).This was a very good book. I simply did NOT find the actions, thoughts, and dialogue believable for a young woman of her age. Up until this point, everyone including both of their parents have assumed they were going to be married because they've dated for so long.

The problem is that this becomes a novel about a girl trying to become a fashion designer in NY and the paraplegic boyfriend is left in the dust after all of 90 pages. To create our lis...A suspenseful, richly layered first novel that asks: How much do we owe the people we love?A suspenseful, richly layered first novel that asks: How much do we owe the people we love?I thought the book was excellent. Her guilt is exacerbated by the fact that she had been gradually falling out of love with him in the months prior. Having read her latest effort (The Children's Crusade), I have come to realize that Ann Packer is someone who can create characters that become very, very present and real. Their life has drastically changed, and now yours has too.Rarely have I cared so much about a character: Carrie Bell is faced with the gut-wrenching decision of staying with her boyfriend, Mike, of 7 years after he has become a quadriplegic. It was kind of like reading a book about dogs who had no idea what dogs were & had only just discovered them & was going on and one about how amazing dogs were, & has no idea that everyone knows what a dog is, dummy.This is actually a re-read. But with pressure from all sides, her mother, Mike's parents, their friends in Madison, Carrie feels terrible about deciding to leave and not return home. He is very much in love with her. The protagonist kept having all these realizations and experiences and stuff that all just seemed really obvious and banal to me. She is also … I listened to the audiobook in one day (it was part of Audible's two books for one credit sale), though I'd heard of it before and just never gotten to it.

Her feelings towards him have cooled, and she doesn't know how to tell him. The problem?