Review Detail

Reader reviewed by FlooCrookshanks

'Carrie' is definitely one of my absolute favourite books of all time. I caught the film on TV late one night completely by accident - the film is incredible on its own, I must add - and I immediately sought out the book to read.

Some of my friends had told me they found the book quite hard to understand, as it does jump around between excerpts from books, quotes from witnesses, extracts from police statements, and actual first-person events from Carrie's point of view. It does pretty much flow chronologically though, and I found that having seen the film beforehand, it was easy to grasp what actually happened and what was an outsider's speculation.

While the film tells the story well, the book provides backstory on Carrie's childhood and homelife. You also find out more about her crazy mother and how Carrie came to realise her powers.

In a nutshell, Carrie is an unpopular sixteen year old girl in high school with a strictly religious mother. Carrie is perceived as odd by her peers - because of her mother's overprotection she's never really had any experience of social interaction, so she often (ignorantly) says and does things which other people find weird (such as blotting on lipstick with a tampon). Consequently, she gets laughed at and bullied a lot; she has no real friends and doesn't really understand why, but by the time she's in high school she's too used to it to dwell on it anymore.

Senior prom is fast approaching, and after a highly embarrassing incident after a PE lesson, some of her classmates take the opportunity to make sure Carrie has a prom she'll never forget.

Meanwhile, Carrie realises that she can move things with the power of her mind alone (telekinesis). She spends hours practicing to harness this power, and is driven to unleashing it on her students at the prom in a frenzy of destruction.

The thing I find fascinating about this book is the character of Carrie herself rather anything about her powers or what she ultimately ends up doing. Stephen King made me feel so badly for Carrie that by the end I was GLAD she'd done what she had. You end up feeling so much empathy for her that she seems almost justified in killing half the people in her town. (Don't worry, this isn't a spoiler - the destruction she caused is stated quite clearly at the beginning).

I could go on and on about this book for a year, I really could. Fascinating read.