Carry on Carrie!

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There’s more to Carrie Bradshaw, the character made famous by Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex And The City, than just her love for Manolo Blahniks and Vera Wang. Candice Bushnell in the prequel to the famous series, The Carrie Diaries, manages to sketch a vulnerable Carrie, who gets obsessed with the charming classmate Sebastian Kydd (in her Calculus class), despite his cheating on her with her best friend Lali. The book traces how she finally picks up pieces of her young life in the suburbs of Connecticut and gets a writer’s job in the city of her dreams, New York and meets the sassy and sexy Samantha Jones.
The story does drag a bit in parts, but Bushnell’s understanding of a woman’s mind is what makes Carrie’s character so endearing.
Raised by a strict father, Bushnell charts Carrie’s heartbreaking journey with her sisters, her early feminist days and sparks of writing (stories that she never finished, one was about donating a kidney to a boy whom she wanted to save). Most touching was the line, “Secretly I’m a romantic just like my father” and I think this belief in timeless love can be seen later on also in her interactions with Mr Big.
After a string of crushes and boyfriends (Doug, Sam, Ryan, the list is pretty diverse and interesting), Carrie always believes that “funny makes all the bad things go away”. Snogging the debonair Kydd in cinema halls, to meeting the balanced George Carter (she admits she doesn’t know why she falls for the bad ones), Carrie still maintains that wild streak in her that has made her character go down in history as “someone you can relate to at all times”.
They say what goes around, comes around and this is what eventually happens with Carrie, she “steals” Kydd from the femme fatale Donna LaDonna, and then encounters her sweetheart dancing with her best friend Lali. But here’s the twist in the tale, Kydd can’t stick to one woman, and is soon caught “making out” with Lali’s younger sister, which finally reunites the once lost and bitter friends.
A bit of an “emotional quicksand”, but Carrie being Carrie manages to put it behind her and get admission to the reputed Brown University.
A young Carrie is also shown as an accepting person, who stands by her gay friend Walt, when he is thrown out of the house by his family, and is forced to live in a tent. Somewhere deep down Carrie, connects with everyone around her and is a “true friend” (Walt, Lali, Maggie, and the Mouse are soulmates) as she offers her room and a warm dinner to the shattered Walt.
As Carrie arrives in the glitzy New York, to start a new life she realises after being robbed, it will be “quite a journey”.