Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Carry the Ocean
SERIES: The Roosevelt #1
AUTHOR: Heidi Cullinan
PUBLISHER: Samhain Publishing
LENGTH: 268 pages
BLURB:
Normal is just a setting on the dryer.
High school graduate Jeremey Samson is looking forward to burying his head under the covers and sleeping until it’s time to leave for college. Then a tornado named Emmet Washington enters his life. The double major in math and computer science is handsome, forward, wicked smart, interested in dating Jeremey—and he’s autistic.
But Jeremey doesn’t judge him for that. He’s too busy judging himself, as are his parents, who don’t believe in things like clinical depression. When his untreated illness reaches a critical breaking point, Emmet is the white knight who rescues him and brings him along as a roommate to The Roosevelt, a quirky new assisted living facility nearby.
As Jeremey finds his feet at The Roosevelt, Emmet slowly begins to believe he can be loved for the man he is behind the autism. But before he can trust enough to fall head over heels, he must trust his own conviction that friendship is a healing force, and love can overcome any obstacle.
Warning: Contains characters obsessed with trains and counting, positive representations of autism and mental illness, a very dark moment, and Elwood Blues.
REVIEW:
Autism is like an ocean for me. Little things are overwhelming. Senses, touches. Everyone else can read faces, but I can’t. Everyone else knows how to look people in the eye, but I can’t. Only autistic people have to have special classes and facial recognition charts to understand what people mean and say. When you’re autistic, everyone acts as if you’re not a real human. I’m angry at my family because they said I was a real human, but when I say I’m your boyfriend, they say I can’t be. So they lied. I’m not a real human…
That’s my ocean. I have to pretend as best I can to be like people on the mean so people don’t call me a robot. I’m not a robot. I’m real and I have feelings the same as everyone else. And I want a boyfriend. Except my ocean doesn’t make me want to be dead. It makes me want to fight. I want you to fight too, Jeremey. I want us to carry our oceans together.
Jeremey and Emmet live on opposite sides of the ‘tracks.’ Literally, as their houses are seperated by a set of railroad tracks. Anyone who would look at Jeremey would think he’s ‘normal’–but he is crippled by a severe case of depression and anxiety. Anyone who’s around Emmet for any amount of time can tell he will never be seen as normal–but for all the difficulties that his Autism brings, he has spent his life finding ways to manage it and lead a good life.
Emmet has had a crush on Jeremey from almost the first moment he saw him, but can’t help feeling that his Autism is a deal breaker for having a relationship with the cute boy from across the tracks. Jeremey just wants to get through the day without his parents driving him further down the dark hole of his depression. Neither of them expect the other to want them as they are, but it is who they are that makes them fit together. But no matter how much they care, their mental states mean that their lives are never going to simple. And if they are not careful, the love they have for each other, might just be the thing to bring them both down.
This was the first of two (or the second, if we are going by which book I started first, or which one I finished first) books dealing with depression that I read this week. I totally did not plan it that way, they just happen to release during the same week, and so I got a double dose of all those sad feelings. Which probably explains why I went thru so many damn tissues in the last five days. And while I really enjoyed both of these stories, I am so going to need to find me some fluff to read in the next few days or I’m going to be stuck here in weepy land forever.
But even if this book was a bit depressing (especially in the first half) I really did love it. I was a bit unsure how the dual 1st person pov was going to work out, but it did an awesome job of bringing to life Emmet and Jeremey (with three E’s–which is totally tripping out my spellchecker). Getting so far inside both of these guys’ heads was perfect for this story, because there is so much going on in there that we had to see personally in order to really understand them.
Emmet’s Autism was really fascinating to read about. I’ve read a few stories that deal with this subject (though they are mostly fanfics), but I don’t know a whole lot about it. And the fact that each case is unique to the person with it, means that even if I had read a hundred books with Autistic characters, it would be likely that this would be brand new, anyways. I loved how Emmet’s mind worked. It was interesting to see the difference of what was going on in his head juxtaposed with what other characters saw. What would seem rather odd to them, made perfect sense when we see it from Emmet’s pov–and the differences made the story fun to read.
And Jeremey’s depression and anxiety was incredibly well written. It could have come across as pretty fake, but the way he spiraled down into the depression, intermixed with the high-points of his time with Emmet, read as pretty realistic. Emmet couldn’t fix Jeremey. In fact, Jeremey probably can’t fix Jeremey. But Jeremey has to learn how to manage what is probably going to be a life-long battle, and there aren’t going to be very many easy answers for him.
I did want to drop-kick his mother, though. Gods, but she was horrible. Even if by the end I think I mellowed down into annoyance instead of seething hatred.
This was a very good story and I’m totally recommending you pick it up. The topics were interesting, but I never felt I was being lectured at–even if I did learn a thing or two. The Blues Brothers stuff did get a bit tedious by the end, but I’ve never really cared for the movie so that wasn’t much of a surprise. I had a lot of fun reading this, though, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this series whenever they get written.
RATING:
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