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niaforrester's review
5.0
Carmen DuPre, the main character in 'Schooling Carmen' defines herself almost entirely by how physically attractive she is. She's beautiful and knows that she is, and uses that beauty like a weapon against the entire world. Men who find her attractive she despises, and women who dare acknowledge her attractiveness, she belittles. She is, at the beginning of this book, a truly despicable human being.
She was so despicable that I would have had a hard time reading on had Kathleen Cross not given us something more. The something more is Carmen's persistent grief at the death of her father, her fear that she is about to lose her looks, her pain at not being loved by her mother in the way she needs to be loved, and her regret at the loss of her one true love, Randall and shortly after that, her best friend Yvette. Were it not for those things, which humanize Carmen, she would have been a caricature. But she was not.
Kathleen Cross made me begin to pity Carmen before I was even one-third of the way through the book, even while she did and said the most hateful things, insulted people around her, and thought nothing of dismissing the men who tried to woo her. What Cross did was show us the world through Carmen's eyes, but at the same time showed us how flawed her view was. Somehow, she made us understand that Carmen is at her heart someone who feels truly and deeply alone. And one scene where Carmen realizes that 'alone-ness' darn near broke my heart.
Through personal adversity, Carmen finally has to face who she is, and the untruth she has told herself: that her looks are all she has to offer. Many of the core messages of the book could have come across as corny: 'there is triumph after adversity', 'you had to go through that to get where you are now' 'true friends are those who stick around when you need them, even if you don't want them', and 'you never know what the person next to you is going through'. All of those messages were reinforced in this story, but not in an overly sentimental way, so they were easy to receive.
And Carmen's 'schooling'--the process of her learning these lessons--was delivered by this writer with such color and humor and emotion that I managed to laugh, get teary-eyed and a little pissed-off all in one book. At the end, when Carmen arrived at the place where she was meant to be, I was glad to have taken the journey with her.
She was so despicable that I would have had a hard time reading on had Kathleen Cross not given us something more. The something more is Carmen's persistent grief at the death of her father, her fear that she is about to lose her looks, her pain at not being loved by her mother in the way she needs to be loved, and her regret at the loss of her one true love, Randall and shortly after that, her best friend Yvette. Were it not for those things, which humanize Carmen, she would have been a caricature. But she was not.
Kathleen Cross made me begin to pity Carmen before I was even one-third of the way through the book, even while she did and said the most hateful things, insulted people around her, and thought nothing of dismissing the men who tried to woo her. What Cross did was show us the world through Carmen's eyes, but at the same time showed us how flawed her view was. Somehow, she made us understand that Carmen is at her heart someone who feels truly and deeply alone. And one scene where Carmen realizes that 'alone-ness' darn near broke my heart.
Through personal adversity, Carmen finally has to face who she is, and the untruth she has told herself: that her looks are all she has to offer. Many of the core messages of the book could have come across as corny: 'there is triumph after adversity', 'you had to go through that to get where you are now' 'true friends are those who stick around when you need them, even if you don't want them', and 'you never know what the person next to you is going through'. All of those messages were reinforced in this story, but not in an overly sentimental way, so they were easy to receive.
And Carmen's 'schooling'--the process of her learning these lessons--was delivered by this writer with such color and humor and emotion that I managed to laugh, get teary-eyed and a little pissed-off all in one book. At the end, when Carmen arrived at the place where she was meant to be, I was glad to have taken the journey with her.
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