Rating: 
Summary: You've got to live your own life....
Review: I loved this book until Carrie moves back to Madison. She was doing so well in NYC, certainly better than she was in Madison (headed nowhere). She had friends, a lover and was headed for the career she always wanted. Once she goes back I could hardly stand to read it any more. She has essentially given up her own life to fill the needs of people who can't take care of herself (even Mike sees this). Read and enjoy the first 2/3rds and then move on.
Rating: 
Summary: Thought Provoking and Emotional
Review: Carrie Bell has lived in Madison Wisconsin her whole life. She's had the same boyfriend since High School, and now at twenty three years of age, is wearing an engagement ring, and heading towards the alter. But Carrie wonders if life has more to offer, and tragically that wish is granted when her fiancee Mike is horribly injured in a diving accident.Starting a painful moral dilemma, she packs a bag and heads to New York City escaping a life she feels she had been fated to lead.
Packer paints a vivid before and after picture of Carrie's quiet, sedate life in rural suburbia, to the teeming urban jungle of Manhattan.
Her first person narrative sucks you in, packing an emotional wallop as Carrie tries to marry her two worlds and find forgiveness from both the people she left, and herself.Filled with original and honest characters, I thought this was a great first novel. One that I was sad to put down.
Rating:
Summary: Emotional Powerhouse
Review: This is the first book I have read by Ann Packer and it won't be my last! Her story about a 23 year old Wisconsin girl who feels stifled by her life with her routine boyfriend kept my attention from page 1. After a tragic accident leaves her fiance paralyzed she runs to New York to try to discover who she really is. The author explores her relationships with her fiance, new boyfriend, mom,and best friend with great depth and emotion. This book made me laugh and cry. It made me think deeply about how life can change in an instant and how there will always be opportunities that we can take or let pass by. I loved this book and was only disappointed when it ended because I wanted to know more and more about what lies in the future for these very interesting characters!
Rating: 
Summary: Ultimately, who cares?
Review: Although this book was quick and somewhat engaging, when I completed it I was left wondering what I had just read. The character development is so anemic that you don't care about Carrie, Mike, Kilroy, Rooster, or any of the other main players. The best one in the whole thing was the mom, who at least spoke some sense once in awhile, but who rarely made an appearance and was never fleshed out. I was waiting for some major symbolic meaning to emerge in the use of the sewn garments (nightgown/robe and green velvet dress) but it never surfaced. We never find out what makes Kilroy tick, and the cliched description of New York was too much! Overall, not worth the time spent reading it.
Rating:
Summary: Well, it wasn't terrible...
Review: The Dive From Clausen's Pier was initially engaging. Being 23 isn't always the great ride that everyone thinks it is-some of us are stuck in between adult life and childhood, trying to reconcile responsibilities with real life. To that end, Packer has created a crippling (pardon the pun) dilemma: stay with someone that you no longer love out of obligation or follow your heart across the country. But the problem in this book lies less in the premise than in the execution of the main character, Carrie. She's a completely indifferent and I had trouble summoning up any type of sympathy for her and I had even more trouble figuring out why anyone cared about her. There was very little character development on her part, and for the most part you realize that much of the novel just didn't ring true at all and you're left thinking "what did I just read"?
Rating: 
Summary: Witty
Review: I'm reading this now and can hardly pull myself away from it. Incidentally, I wonder if Ann Packer designed the dust jacket, if that's her personal joke. Well, back to the book.
Rating:
Summary: Starts great, takes a dive
Review: Packer starts her ambitious novel with a picture-perfect prologue: in spare, elegant prose she sets the scene and sends her protagonist's boyfriend to his quadriplegic fate. She takes the reader inside Carrie's head, and her strong writing keeps us engaged as Carrie and friends wait for Mike to emerge from his coma and as Carrie dithers over whether or not she'll look like a creep if she dumps Mike now. Packer has populated her story with a few interesting people--the therapist mom, the co-dependent friend, Mike's pal Rooster--so we forgive the lack of plot and the lack of character development. Abruptly, the book switches directions. (Perhaps Packer decided that readers must be as bored with Madison as she and Carrie were.) Without warning to mom, friends, fiance, or the reader, Carrie jumps in her car and drives to New York. (Apparently young women never meet with foul play in Madison--Carrie's mom and friends don't seem concerned about her disappearance--they all somehow know that she skipped town because she didn't want to deal with her feelings about Mike.) Packer's leisurely style becomes lethargic once Carrie hits the Big Apple, where she quickly acquires a free place to live, the stereotypical gay buddy, and an enigmatic boyfriend, Kilroy. Except he's not an interesting enigma; Carrie never figures out what makes him tick, and neither do we. What's more, it's hard to care, or to understand what she sees in him. Nor does New York feel "real." Packer, who excels in portraying Madison, fails to capture any of the essence of the big city. The reader is still inside Carrie's head, but not a lot seems to be going on there. Much of her behavior is inexplicable. For example: she's planning to come to Madison for a visit (Rooster's wedding). Being a talented seamstress, she buys the most gorgeous, expensive fabric in the most upscale fabric store in New York and fashions a stunning outfit for herself. Then, at the last moment, she decides not to go. This scene, which could (and should) have some emotional depth--might even explain Carrie's internal state of disrepair--is simply flat. Finally, Carrie comes home to Madison (she never should have left) and the story picks up again--but by then I was tired of her whining, her lack of insight, her poor impulse control, and her inability to learn from her past mistakes. Other reviewers have mentioned the sex scenes. I suspect that a well-meaning friend or editor told Packer that she needed to spice up her book, and that's why she inflicted these embarrassing and ineptly written episodes on her readers. Bottom line: not awful, not great, could have been better.
Rating:
Summary: a lucky find
Review: I was browsing in the worlds best used bookstore, ... when I happened across a advanced readers copy of this book. It said on the back cover it was about a girl in Madison, WI-Kismet, co-winky-dink? Who knows. Best [money] i have spent in awhile. Ann Packer's novel made me cry and laugh, made me start sewing again (I kid you not). This lady MUST have lived in Madison, she knew everything about my favorite city on the lakes, down to the parks! A must read!
Rating:
Summary: Boring, tedious..........
Review: This book is very benign considering the subject matter. Carrie as the lead character is one dimensional.
It's very hard to like the character of Kilroy and he's oh so boring! There's no "love" here, just sex. Carrie doesn't even know who he is half the time.
I wanted to stay in Madison during most of the New York chapters, with everybody else BUT Carrie.
A big disappointment!
Rating:
Summary: Eloquent, touching and incisive
Review: "The Dive from Claussen's Pier" is my favorite type of novel...an intriguing, relatively fast read that is also well written and full of depth. It is definitely one of the best books I've read in a while. Very well drawn, natural characters, a compelling plot and excellently detailed settings. This is a novel that asks questions about morality, loyalty and self. It very effectively chronicles the nature of first love and growing up in general...a "coming of age" story with a major twist. The first book I've had a real emotional response to in a long time. Although it deals with tragedy, it also very deftly describes some of the "growing pains" many of us go through in our early to mid twenties (changing friendships, figuring out who you are and what you want out of life in general, etc.).
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