Rating: 
Summary: Wonderfully depressing
Review: Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" is a complex novel of linear events. It is a study in cause and effect -- how a character's environment, or change of environment, affects his or her values, especially with regard to money and the iniquity it brings. 18-year-old Caroline "Carrie" Meeber, bored with her life in a small Wisconsin town, comes to Chicago in 1889 to live with her sister Minnie. The only employment she can get is a laborious, low-paying job in a shoe factory, and when she loses it and wears out her welcome with her sister's family, a well-to-do young man named Charles Drouet, whom she met on the train to Chicago, sets her up in an apartment where they pretend to be married. Drouet has a friend named George Hurstwood, a man in his late thirties and the manager at a local upscale bar. Hurstwood's home life is stagnant and empty; he has a self-centered wife whom he ceased loving long ago and two materialistic children around Carrie's age. He is going through what many decades later would be called a midlife crisis. Through Drouet, Hurstwood meets Carrie and they form a mutual attraction. Unlike Drouet, to whom life is all about social status, Hurstwood does not patronize Carrie; he makes her feel intelligent and important, and Carrie exhibits Hurstwood's ideals of youth and beauty. When Hurstwood's wife gets wise to her husband's affair and sues him for divorce, Hurstwood succumbs to the temptation to steal money from his employer and tricks Carrie into leaving Chicago with him. They go to New York and experience curious reversals of fortune -- Carrie becomes a rich and famous showgirl while Hurstwood drifts into inescapable poverty and a bitter end. This is no Cinderella story for Carrie. It may seem like she is being rewarded for her innocence and integrity, but since she realizes that her success is more the result of luck than talent, her new life is not as fulfilling as she thought it might be. I found myself surprisingly engaged by the story because Dreiser presents his characters as real people with unsolvable problems and doesn't try to teach a morality lesson. I finished the novel feeling miserable about the world, which is not something that many novels can do to me. My only complaint is that Dreiser's prose is a little awkward and excessively wordy without the benefit of clarity; it longs for the smoother touch of D.H. Lawrence or Somerset Maugham.
Rating:
Summary: One of the greats
Review: Okay, I'll admit it: I'm normally one to stick with the bestseller or current Oprah list suggestion; books like "The Da Vinci Code" or "The Bark of the Dogwood." And while those books were enjoyable, I will go back and visit (or re-visit) the "classics." Such is the case with "Sister Carrie." At first I was afraid this was going to be some turn-of-the-century, stodgy, "Oh, My! Look at that!" type of novel. Boy, was I wrong. This is one great book, and Dreiser not only gets down and dirty with the material, but presents it in a non-preachy way that will knock your socks off. T.Dreiser is without a doubt, one of the most underappreciated authors ever to grace the American scene. This book is, or should be, on the same level as "To Kill A Mockingbird" or "Grapes of Wrath." I highly, highly, highly (can you tell I liked it?) recommend this book to you.
Rating:
Summary: Great story...once you feel the writing style
Review: This is the first Theodore Dreiser novel that I have read, and this proved to be a good place to start, being his debut work, written at the turn of the 20th century. Dreiser writes in a florid, descriptive type of way that takes a little getting accustomed to, but then establishes a groove. Let me give a word of warning: this is a very engrossing novel. It tells the story of Carrie, a young and impressionable girl of 18, who moves away from her small hometown to stay with her settled sister and brother-in-law in Chicago, and almost immediately (in fact, on the train journey to Chicago) makes an impression on a man, Drouet, with whom she would eventually develop a romantic relationship. That relationship sours when a more attractive prospect of a man appears within her sights, and she is in turn pursued by that man, Hurstwood. Both men are upper middle class achievers, both more than a little pretentious, but both smitten by Carrie, a plain Jane who becomes a beauty.
The story encompasses her struggles with poverty and hardship, wanting desperately, having, and then losing it, only to regain it by her own pluck and ambition. We are, of course, referring to material gain. The themes in this story run very deep. We witness, in a very well told manner, the trappings of wealth, the comfort and predictability of it, and then the rapid decline in fortunes that Carrie endures with Hurstwood, a proud man who fails, and is struck down by both his obsession for, indifference to, and then ultimate reliance on Carrie, which would have seemed incredible in the early stages of their relationship. I found the story of Hurstwood to be moving in that he had been financially comfortable, married (albeit a predictable and dull marriage), with teenage children; and then out of perhaps boredom, a little arrogance and a feeling of "just because he could", he pursued Carrie, the circumstances of which led to his ruination. His business endeavours sour, and he is too proud to seek positions below those to which he had become accustomed. Dreiser writes very movingly about Hurstwood's declining financial status and the shifting sandbars on which he maroons himself. He becomes a morose, inert, and powerless individual, when there once was power. He is cast off by the type of people over whom he had previously had power. Surviving New York on 15 cents a day, even in 1900, must have been near impossible. In the end, for Hurstwood, it was. His indolence and pride destroyed him as a man.
Carrie, in the meantime, achieves the kind of success that seemed fantastical when she had been but a poor shopgirl struggling for $4.50 a week in Chicago. She is ultimately dissatisfied with her new-found wealth and celebrity. She knows that her work is easy and her success not achieved by hard work or years of labour; her failure in both relationships (albeit with men a good deal older than herself) has made her guarded and lonely. She keeps longing for that which is "ideal" but which is just out of her grasp. She is always something of an outsider, elusive and therefore desirable to those around her.
In the end, she is as tentative and alone as when the story began; as the author writes "In your rocking chair, by your window, shall you long, alone. In your rocking chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel."
Rating: 
Summary: Sister Carrie
Review: "Sister Carrie" by Theodore Dreiser portrays the different lifestyles of the turn of the century. I think the main theme of this book is greed. The characters will do anything for money even jeopardize their relationships. The main character, Carrie, even leaves her family to go find money. She moves to Chicago to find work, which will end up being wealth for her. During this time large cities such as Chicago were places of great economic growth. They were full of factories. A fair amount of unwed women were working in these dirty factories to make around $6 a week. This money was just enough for food, rent, and maybe some odds and end stuff but definitely not enough for a young woman to be happy.
During this time, and like today, people are judged by how much money they have. People will stare and know if you are of a lower class than them or of a higher and then they envy you. Your clothes play a big role in distinguishing between the different classes of wealth. Carrie hated her life as being in the poor class and wanted bigger and better things for herself and she knew the only way for that was with money.
She gets in with two guys and we know she is just in it for the money. They are using her for her body and she is using them for their money. Both are forms of prostitution. They take care of the bills and by that then they own her and can do whatever they want. She is always acting. She is never a "genuine" character. She knows what kind of woman these high risers like and that's what she portrays herself as.
Her acting continues throughout her life and never ends. She is used for her beauty and never for anything else. I think we as the readers know more about her life and what she is doing to it rather than she does. Even at the end of the story she doesn't know what her life means. She is lonely and doesn't understand why.
This book is good but can drag on at times. The middle is a little dreary but perks up at the end. I enjoyed reading it especially with it being a historical fiction. Dreiser does a great job showing what life was really like at the turn of the century. The great moral of the story to me is that wanting is fine but if it interferes with the rest of your life is not worth wanting.
Rating:
Summary: Cinderella Story with a Twist
Review: Wow! My family book club read Sister Carrie immediately after finishing a book about another Carrie -- Carol Kennicott of Main Street. What a great pair of books to read together.
I found Sister Carrie to be even more readable than Main Street. To me, this book read much like a soap opera. The girl who "works" her way from rags to riches, the tormented (or tormenting?) men she leaves behind.
This is a GREAT book for discussion, because we found that what we thought about these characters changed with each chapter. We also spent some time trying to figure out what the chapter titles. The "tinder box" theme was especially delicious.
Sister Carrie was the type of book that you have a hard time putting down. What will happen next? Our group predicted and changed our minds a hundred times.
I think this novel about a young woman's venture from country life into the city and all of the people she affects is definitely one most anyone would enjoy. I especially recommend reading it in comparison to Main Street, in which the opposite happens - a girl moves from Minneapolis to rural Minnesota.
Also like Main Street, Dreiser uses personal experiences in Sister Carrie. In fact, the introduction by Richard Lingeman in the Signet edition was especially interesting to me. I recommend reading it after you've read Sister Carrie. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: One of the greats
Review: Sister Carrie is a lovely book. It tells a rather profound story--placed specifically in its time, which was of course the 'Modern Day' for the time it was written. As a result a book that was once a critical document of patterns of behavior of some of the author's contemporaries has become, for better or worse, an important historical chronical of the dangers of selfishness and uninhibited personal ambition. Oh, the story is no longer anything unfamiliar, but the grounding and the character studies make this book very affecting and, true to the ideals of its unfortunate literary designation of 'Naturalism' (a meaningless term which limits instead of explains a readers' expectation, much in the way that science-fiction or horror classify something as not necessisarily what it in fact is), this is a very believable and realistic story. The writing itself, as other readers and critics throughout the past one hundred years or so have repeated when attempting to find fault with Sister Carrie, isn't the most impressive thing about the book. However, in its defense, the cut and dry, occasionally pasted on moments of philosophical conversation and the rugged and perhaps at times inconsistant speech patterns of the various characters somehow, for me, created an even more believable picture, zoning in on those people who attempt to speak both above and beneath their social class and educational backgrounds for either personal gain or in a futile effort to 'fit in'. A wonderful book, because of its flaws, in fact, that reads like a quick-paced and absorbing tale always on the verge of tragedy. That tension, that what-will-happen-next feeling pervades throughout the book and concludes by providing quite an impact indeed.
Rating:
Summary: Read it for English class...
Review: In my English 3 honors class, we had to pick a novel out of a list, and then do a big project on it. I chose this book, because the summary that my teacher gave me made it look very interesting. This book took me so long to read, but I still enjoyed it! It ends totally different from the how it starts and there was no way to predict what was going to happen. I'd heard that this book was banned by some when it came out, I didn't find it offensive at all. Maybe women were'nt allowed to have affairs back then?! Overall, I enjoyed this novel and would recommend it to any book lover!
Rating:
Summary: A Classic of American Naturalism
Review: Wow. I can't believe how many reviews have been written about this book! I would recommend this book to people interested in the concept of the city. Although its notoriety stems from its "naturalistic" depiction of the characters, I thought it was the depcition of the urban environment of Chicago and New York which stood out. While the intertwined fates of Carrie, Drouet and Hurstwood occupy the foreground of this book, I found myself consistently drawn to the back ground. Since Dreiser came up as a newspaperman, this makes a certain amount of sense. The details that Dreiser includes about the day-to-day life in the big city at the turn of the century were worth the price of admission, so to speak. The plot of the novel, concerning Carrie and her rise and fall and rise, was less notable, as far as I'm concerned. This is not a short book, and some of the economic turmoil suffered by the characters tapped in to a larger well spring of fear and anxiety about social status that many Americans(including myself) share. While not what I would call a "fun" read, it is fairly light, and certainly worthwhile.
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