Pride

Rating:
Summary: Finding a Voice
Review: Cary is a gifted writer with an ear for dialogue. She makes the plot move quickly without sacrificing characterization. The four women came alive on the page for me. Arneatha's response to the baby, Tamara's bitter ironies and witticisms, Roz's razor-sharp determination, Audrey's compounding losses (music, sight, father, self), all came through in Cary's careful attention to individual detail.

If you want a good entertaining read that opens you up to think about the ways in which women try to keep it together while things around us change and collapse and reformulate in ways that seem too fast and too much for us to absorb, read Pride.

Rating:
Summary: Solid entertaining literature
Review: Cary is a gifted writer with an ear for dialogue. She makes the plot move quickly without sacrificing characterization. The four women came alive on the page for me. Arneatha's response to the baby, Tamara's bitter ironies and witticisms, Roz's razor-sharp determination, Audrey's compounding losses (music, sight, father, self), all came through in Cary's careful attention to individual detail.

If you want a good entertaining read that opens you up to think about the ways in which women try to keep it together while things around us change and collapse and reformulate in ways that seem too fast and too much for us to absorb, read Pride.

Rating:
Summary: PRIDE should have made me leave this book on the shelf!
Review: For anybody who is reading, May God be with you! The ONLY reason I am giving this book two stars is because when the affair was exposed, the emotional turmoil began. That part was very interesting. After that, there was nothing to invest in because there was nothing left. The title should have been renamed, well, I can think of a few choice words to use on the cover. Believe me, PRIDE wouldn't have made the list.

Rating:
Summary: Integrity and joy
Review: I very much enjoyed PRIDE for what it had to say about friendship, and for how Lorene Cary interwove four women's lives -- four different women -- while maintaining the integrity of their voices. I felt PRIDE was reality-based, as opposed to playing into commercial ideas of friendship. It is, in a sense, anti-sit-com. I love Cary's resilence to the obvious, and to this degree she furthered herself immeasurably as a writer of the Afircan-American experience. She will never play to the easy assumptions. Read PRIDE playing close attention to the decriptions of events -- the bazaar, the airplane ride, the street scenes. Cary is masterful at capturing the ebb and flow of people, and how daily life influences the patterns of our thought and the nature of our relationships. In this book, she turns her eye to friendship and reveals just how stubbornly different they are from family. In PRICE OF A CHILD (her first novel) she looked at family. Both are great books, and in both she gets inside your head.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing after Black Ice
Review: I'm not going to be quite as harsh as many others who trashed this book. I loved Black Ice, so I started this book with a much more positive attitude. One of its problems is that it does't know if it's a tragedy, a comedy, or a statement of the human condition. The opening chapter aims at humor at the wedding, but then there are wrenching scenes like Nikki's abortion and the affair between Tam and Hiram. The book needed much better editing, a livlier story line and better writing. Though the characters are interesting, the writing is flat and ponderous and it really does drag on. I read for a few hours and was dismayed to see that I was only on page 70. I barely made it to the end, and only because I don't like to leave any book unfinished. I think publishers should be more careful when preparing second books. Just because Black Ice was good doesn't mean this one should have made it without chopping. Terry McMillian does this kind of writing about a hundred times better. This book made me want to reread Waiting to Exhale. Cary could take a lesson from McMillian's sense of humor and stronger writing. That being said, there's still hope for Cary if she tightens up the plot, provides clear clues to the narrator and finds a good editor. I'm not writing her off yet.

Rating:
Summary: Finding a Voice
Review: Pride represents an intentional improvement in Lorene Cary's voice. I read Black Ice and found that at times I felt (as a former boarding school student) unbalanced by the things she was saying. It seemed to me that she fluttered between the mature author that she was and the unnerved student whose voice she intended to portray. In Pride, Cary found her voice, and altered the foundations of her confident perspective, to align her words with four distinctly seperate character mentalities. I could hear her thoughts, and smiled at the simplicity and ease in which she seemed to find speaking through her characters. I felt compelled through the pages by the tantilizing subplots that make up the storyboard. The additional perspectives in each situation add comical, emotional and entirely fresh views on things that at first can be quite jarring. The play between harsh reality and alternative interlude is extraordinary. I found reading Pride a joy, and was thoroughly impressed by its complexity after what i considered a flat narrative in Black Ice. You will enjoy this book.

Rating:
Summary: terrible
Review: This, without a doubt, has to be one of the WORST books, if not the worst book I have EVER read! Absolutely awful pretty much sums up my feelings and from reading some of the other reviews, I feel like I'm not alone in my feelings on this book. I usually read a book in a week to two weeks but this book literally took me MONTHS to finish. It was so horrible that I could only tolerate a few pages at a time before I'd have to put it down again. It was confusing and boring and not worth my time or anyone's time for that matter. SKIP THIS BOOK!

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Read!
Review: When my book club selected Pride, I had never read anything by Cary. I will definitely buy Black Ice.

Pride reads more like classical literature rather than a novel. I think this is the problem a lot of the readers are having - it's not a harlequin romance.

I disagree with readers who say that the conflict between Roz and Tam was never resolved. Roz forgave her husband and terminated contact with her friend. While it would have been more dramatic for Roz to throw her husband out, it is unrealistic expectation of a politicians wife (witness Hillary Clinton and Gary Hart's wife).

I found the characters so well developed that I had mental pictures of them. I know black women similar to each of the characters.

I hope Cary writes another soon.