Becoming Carly Klein

Set in and around summer in early 1990, this coming-of-age story follows Carly Klein, a sophomore student (15 going on 16) at an all-girls school where she struggles to care about anything going on. Her homelife is rough, with two parents with professional careers – her mother a psychiatrist and her father an advertising guy – who are too absorbed in their own lives to really care that much about Carly.

With a rebellious streak just beginning, Carly reads her mother’s confidential patient notes and forms a crush on a blind college student, Daniel, a few years older than her. She follows him home on occasion to find out more about him, though actually having anything to do with him doesn’t begin until around two-thirds of the way through, which based on the blurb I expected to happen much sooner.

The early part of the story is more focussed on Carly and her gradual decline in mental health and the ramping up of her rebelling. She is sent away to summer camp which doesn’t go well, drops out of school without her parents knowing, and generally doing anything she can to avoid her parents. Eventually she forms a professional relationship with Daniel where she reads his course work to him. A relationship which slowly turns romantic. Daniel is toxic, although Carly seems oblivious for the most part as she is too young and too smitten with her college lifestyle to notice.

The story was a riveting listen, like watching a train wreck it was hard to turn away as Carly seemed hellbent on ruining her life. Some excellent character growth over the story as the traumatic circumstances and tumultuous relationship takes their toll on Carly and her family.

It did take me a while to pinpoint when this story was set, with early mentions of the Iran-Contra Affair and Ronald Reagan, I thought it was mid-’80s, but it’s actually set in the early ’90s. So, while billed as “contemporary” it is set 35-odd years ago, which is actually a nice change to not have the ubiquitous technology of today everywhere. The themes of a troubled family life, emotional turmoil and trying to fit in still resonate today though, so still generally fits the bill in the contemporary sense.

I did have to wonder about the accuracy in the portrayal of Daniel. Admittedly, I don’t know anyone who is blind, but from other stories, TV shows, and movies it feels to me like there were a few things that were out of place. Carly, for example, hides her presence from Daniel by simply being as quite as possible while standing near him, even though she’d smell like cigarette smoke. She always wore a wig, but that was never questioned even though you’d assume he’d have touched her hair at least once.

The narration by Lauren Dietzel is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, her voice was pleasant and easy to listen to for long stretches. On the other, though, the production quality is dreadful. With very obvious retakes as the sound and quality mismatch dramatically all the way throughout this audiobook. With multiple occurrences of background noises throughout, this really dampened the whole thing for me.

A few other issues I noted were the extra-long silences between chapters which had me reaching for the app to see if it had stopped playing, and the first five minutes of chapter one appears in the “Dedication” chapter, so that gets repeated once you get to chapter one.

Overall, the story was absorbing, and it’s a bit of a shame it was let down the by audio quality. Listening to the rollercoaster ride of Carly’s life over the few months of her life and how she tackled it was enjoyable and made me want to go give my kids some extra hugs. Some open questions remain by the end, but much like life and as Carly found out, you don’t always get all the answers.

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