Carol turned out to be one of those books that I’m glad I read, but in the end didn’t make as much of an impression on me as I’d originally hoped.
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I’m sure you all know that it’s a story of forbidden love between a young woman and an older one, Carol, who has a family, who want to use their prejudices to stop her from seeing her daughter. It should have been very compelling, and to be fair I was convinced by Therese’s love for her, but I wasn’t totally gripped...
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I definitely had some issues with the dialogue here, too. Highsmith’s writing was fine when she was just narrating events, but the dialogue felt clunky and often repetitive.
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What I DID love was the exploration of lesbian love in a period where prejudices were rampant. Carol’s struggle between her love for Therese and the battle to see her daughter was truly heartbreaking, and Highsmith really pushed the boundaries when she published this in 1952.
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So overall I mostly agree with what Steph @bookplaits said on my post when I started reading this one: the narrative (but not the dialogue for me) was good and the subject matter vastly interesting to me, but otherwise it fell short of my expectations.