What would you do?

When I moved to San Francisco and started my first job out of college, a woman about 5 or 6 years older than me (so she was probably 29 or 30 years old) named Jessica was assigned to train me in my position.

Jessica was totally cool and interesting and she had a fantastic haircut and wore really awesome clothes. We immediately became “work friends”. One of the benefits of a work friend is that you spend 40 plus hours a week together and with that comes a very intimate knowledge of the other’s personal life.

She soon let me know that about a year before we met, Jessica’s boyfriend was in a motorcycle accident which left him as a paraplegic. After a lot of soul searching, Jessica made the very difficult decision to stay with him through his rehabilitation because she loved him and wanted a future with him. She learned how to take care of him, and even learned how to have sex with him again. However, about a year after the accident, he broke up with her stating that he never intended to marry her or spend the rest of his life with her before the accident occurred.

As you might imagine, she was devastated. She soon quit and we didn’t keep in touch. I do think about her quite often, and wondered how I would make the same decision, if I were forced to.

This very long winded introduction is necessary to explain why I was so excited to read “The Dive from Clausen’s Pier” by Ann Packer. Carrie Bell is 23 years old, living in Madison, Wisconsin and unhappily engaged to her high school boyfriend, Mike. Carrie is contemplating leaving Mike when he takes a dive off of Clausen’s Pier into shallow water and ends up paralyzed.

To stay or not to stay, was the question Carrie asked herself. Faced with the most challenging and emotional experience in her life, Carrie chose a path that surprised her friends and Mike by fleeing Madison in the middle of the night, moving to New York City and immediately falling in love with an older, extremely unavailable man.

I thought this book was excellent. Or rather, I thought the main characters were fascinating. I read a lot of reviews and understand that quite a bit of people thought that Carrie was very selfish and one dimensional, but I couldn’t disagree more. I can’t think of anything more selfLESS than Carrie admitting her own limitations, in acknowledging that she just didn’t love Mike enough to stay and to take an incredibly unpopular road all alone.

What I really liked about this book is that I couldn’t predict anything that Carrie was going to do. I won’t give away the ending, but it definitely was quite different than what I expected. I liked that Carrie was not perfect, that she made a lot of people very angry, that she behaved irrationally, that she hurt the person who loved her most. I loved that she was courageous and made a lot of bad decisions because she didn’t want to make the “right” decision that was terribly wrong for her.

There were a few plot points I had a hard time with. For instance, Carrie lived in New York without working, going to school, eating out with friends, on about $3000, which is totally impossible. It shouldn’t have really bothered me, but I hate it when authors get lazy. And the character of Kilroy, the emotionally stunted older man Carrie falls for, was just slightly too formulaic for me.

I give this book a hearty thumbs up for anyone who is in the mood for a surprising read.