Carrie

Rating:
Summary: King's first is still one of the best
Review: I bought this at a half-price bookstore. I started reading it then I got hooked and couldn't stop reading until the very end. I recommend this book to anyone who hasn't read it. It is a must read. Like I said, the first is usually the best!

Rating:
Summary: Carrie- -Short But Wonderfully Sweet!
Review: I had been planning to read a Stephen King book for a long time, and I decided why not start with first, and most classic, book CARRIE? I started reading it on Saturday Morning. I was done with it by Sunday Afternoon. The first two paragraphs of CARRIE just reel you in, and it's a hook you're glad to be stuck on.

CARRIE is about a character named Carrie White, who is the one outcast that everyone only pays attention to when they're in search of a good, cruel laugh. There's one thing they don't know about her, and that is that Carrie is telekenetic (T.K.), a mental condition where the effected mind can be capable of amazing feats, sometimes even deadly ones...and when a girl like Carrie has that power, no one knows what might happen. Stephen King shows all sides of the story beautifully by having various characters revolving around Carrie, and all the well-thought-out bits of information about Carrie herself from books, court testimonials and such.

I give it only four stars out of five because near the end of the novel, there was more action than I wanted, so I became slightly bored. But as soon as it went back to Carrie's Point-of-View, I was once again hooked.

This book, in itself, is very shocking. The sexual terms that Stephen King uses in his writing are always shocking, but for some reason, I wanted to read more of the shock material. I think that in our minds, we always yearn for what we're reading to go over our usaual boundries, and CARRIE most certainly does that.

Because of the shock material, I would recommend this book for anyone older than a very mature twelve year old. It's a great book to just sit down with, read, and enjoy the ride!

Rating:
Summary: Decent First Novel
Review: Carrie is of course entertaining, what King novel isn't?, but it does have it's problems. Carrie is about an outcast in a small rural town named Carrie White. Carrie has a fanatically religious mother and is picked on relentlessly by the other girls in her high school. When the girls finally push Carrie over the edge in a horrifying scene in the girls shower, she realizes she has telekenisis, and she intends to use it.

Overall Carrie was an entertaining novel. What I didn't like is the completly unbelievable portrayal of Carries mother. She doesn't even say anything that isn't fire and brimestone or she doesn't do anything but pray and kick Carrie into the closet. Most of King's psychopaths are fairly believable, like Jack Mort in Drawing of the Three and Jack Torrance in The Shining, but he misses the mark this time. I also thought the villians like Chris and Billy were very one dimensional. They are not complex and they are totally unsympathetic.

I won't grade down to much for these problems because this is his first novel and it's a damn good first novel. I liked how he used newspaper articles and excerpts from books to fill in the background of characters. Overall if your a King fan you'll like this, but if your wanting to get into King, read The Shining or Salem's Lot, you'll like those better.

Rating:
Summary: Don't go to the prom. Ever...
Review: I finally got to read this book, and I'm very glad I did.
The main strength of 'Carrie' is definitely its story, which is simple, chilling and painful. The plot aches with tension as it unfolds, helped by the articles and books interspersed with the dialogue which foreshadow the violent conclusion. This conclusion is inevitable - things had to play out as they did because of the characters of the people involved - and this is one of the most tragic things about the story.
However, this book isn't perfect. I can well believe it was King's first novel because although it's a good read, it is in some ways rather amateur. My main complaint is that I would have appreciated more information about the 'villains' of the piece, that is, Margaret White and Chris Hargensen. Both of them are truly horrible characters, yet there's little or no explanation of why they are like this. Margaret seems to have been a fundamentalist from an early age, but we aren't told why, and considering that her religious beliefs go a long way towards making Carrie what she is, more information would not have been out of place. Chris has even less information, and consequently comes across as pretty two-dimensional.
The other main problem was that of Sue Snell. King seems to have been unsure whether she was as important a character as Carrie - although she contributes to the story by asking Tommy to take Carrie to the prom, etc, her own plotline seems a little superfluous. Her pregnancy fears are unexplored and difficult to empathise with simply because of this. I would have liked a little more interaction between her and Carrie simply because this would make Carrie's death scene with her less - unexpected. Sue just doesn't seem to interact with Carrie enough for the story to demand that she be present at Carrie's death.
However, I still recommend this book. If nothing else, it's a good read, and it does make you think about high-school politics and bullying and if you have picked on someone like Carrie you'd feel pretty guilty. It's a very dramatic story - the writing is vivid and you can see the scenes play out in your mind - and it lingers in your mind after you've read it. Partly this is due to the fact that you are both very sorry for Carrie and horrified at what she's done - it's very hard to make a decision about her. Also the realistic academic books, newspaper articles and courtroom transcriptions add a nice touch because they root the story firmly in the real world (I feel this is especially valuable when talking about telekinesis, as this has often been written about and is very much identified with ghosts and unreal situations.)
Read this book. You'll be left wishing King had said more about various things, but read it anyway...

Rating:
Summary: Historical tribute through the mind of a killer
Review: This book was a thrilling ride though time. Carrie, is one the greatest books written by Steven King. He took the average high school child and mixed her with a mother with a chronic lord loving disease.
Carrie is just one other person in the world trying to get through high school without disobeying her mother. She doesn't have many friends (the average outcast we all never get to know), but from a certain incident the most popular boy in school asked her to the prom. While Carrie is going though all these problems she learns she has an ability to move objects with her mind, called telepathy. At the prom everything goes wrong and she pays back everyone who as ever been cruel to her in the past...

Rating:
Summary: R.I.P. Carietta White
Review: Wow. What an amazing novel. This novel tells the tale of Carietta White, a high school loser who is tormented by her classmates and overzealously religous mother. In Carrie, Stephen King further develops his unique style of writing, using several mediums to convey the story: character thoughts offset in parentheses, hearing committee testimonies, associated press tickers and so on.

King does a great job developing character and plot early in the novel, but what makes this work so strong is King's ability to make the most minor details relevant later in the story. Carrie isn't necessarily a horror, per se, rather a suspenseful thriller. Throughout the whole novel you're just waiting for Carrie to snap. King did a great job of keeping the level of tension taut as an overstretched drum. All in all, Carrie is a tough one to put down until you've turned the last page...and an eerie foreshadowing of the teenage vengeance prevailant in today's high school shootings.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: I always liked the movies made with Stephen King's books, and that's why one day I started reading his work. Carrie of course is a classic, and even if I knew what was going to happen, I thought it was a very good book. I highly recommand it!

Rating:
Summary: Carrie: Re-Evaluating Your Actions
Review: The book dealt a lot with a teenage girl who was a complete outcast...P>This book was an excellent book to read. It makes you think about all of those that you have hurt throughout your years in school. As an example, the book had a teenage girl who was a complete outcast and no matter what she did, she could never fit in. When she finally thought that she was being accepted and got invited to prom, she couldn't have been more wrong. At prom, the election for prom queen was tampered with and she won. As a joke someone set up a bucket of pig's blood over the spot where she would be standing. When she stepped into position, the bucket fell down, covering her with blood. This ended up being the last straw for her. She locked all of the doors with her telekinetic powers and set the place on fire. Everyone inside with a few exceptions, burned within the gym. As teenagers we should think about when out making fun of someone could go too far. It is amazing when you sit down to think about it, as to how many of our peers we have hurt the same way that Carrie was hurt. Even though you may not think that all of the teasing and ignoring could make someone go to the extreme and kill their peers, it does happen. Just think about what happened in Colorado/Columbine. Somewhere along the line those kids didn't feel like they fit in and thye eventually started to hate their peers enough to kill and injure them.

Rating:
Summary: Gripping. Hard to put down.
Review: Carrie, the first novel published by world-famous author Stephen King is still, after all of these years, one of his top ten best books ever written. The story is about a girl named Carrie White a(big suprise eh? j/k) and her struggling years of high school and adoscolence. It's also about how her anger builds up, for she is the most picked on girl at her high school. She discovers that she has telekentic powers. Carrie uses these powers at her prom night and, sadly, dies and kills many other high-schoolers at prom night. Carrie brilliantly illustrates how a teen really feels, believe me, I was once one too you know. Truly one of my favorite books of all time. I read it in one sitting. Highly reccomended for anyone who has enough time to read a good book.

Contains some language and gore.

Rating:
Summary: Stephen King--Carrie
Review: ...

Perhaps one of the most exceptional horror stories published the second half on the twentieth century, "Carrie" is a story that relates to every single teenager at some point in their lives, which is what makes this Stephen King novel one of his most powerful works ever. Carrie White is no ordinary high school girl, and the other students obviously knows this, and they treat her like living hell. But what they don't know about Carrie is that she is ready to snap--to abolish all of the shameful feelings that she has about herself, to quiet her critical, overly-religious mother, and to inflict revenge on those who have hurt her with her telekinetic powers. King portrays his Carrie in a spell-binding fashion, taking us through the tribulations of her first period, the secret love that she has for one of the most popular boys at school, and the riveting prom night in which Carrie's inner demons take full force. Although not long (256 pages), "Carrie" is the definition of a page-turner and a novel that should be read in one setting in order to get the full effect. A true trimumph of horror, emotion, and hate. Brilliant.