Girls in Trucks
by Katie Crouch
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Book Summary Information
Author: Katie CrouchEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-04-07
ISBN: 0316002119
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Book Reviews of Girls in Trucks
Book Review: A fun loving novel about growing up, and family values
Summary: 5 Stars
Reviewed by Gina Holland for RebeccasReads (7/08)
"Girls In Trucks" is about Sarah Walters, a girl growing up in a family of Camellia Society Debutants. As a member, she is expected to be prim and proper: a young lady. She tries very hard. She makes a few friends, and they are expected to stay friends for life. So be it. Sarah grows up about as normal as other girls her age, whatever normal is. She takes us step by step inside her life of pain, love, tragedy, and etcetera.
Sarah loves her mom and dad dearly. She adores her sister even though her sister is always bossing her around. Sarah grows up a lot different then her sister, even though they come from the same household. She gets into things that are really not good for her, including men. She has many different relationships. In one of her relationships with a man named Max, she is very happy, and loves him very much. Until the day he decides to bring another woman home in their bed. Sarah walks out, because she's had enough, but does she return? Or does she move on to other things, other men, other hurtful situations? By the time Sarah is thirty, she's still not married. When is she going to find the right man? She has one unexpected thing in her life that she loves dearly.
This novel brought me back through the memories of my childhood. It reminded me of the things that I went through growing up. When an author writes a book like this one, I believe that they have some of their own childhood memories mixed in, too! That is a good thing. I love the fact that when I read something, I can relate to a lot of the things that the other person is going through. Sarah Walters is a wonderful character. I really enjoyed her. Another good character was her sister. I have known a lot of sister's like Sarah's. Always teasing their younger sister, making the little sister does things for her. It's all a part of growing up and the love of sisters. I loved this book because it did take me back to my younger days. Something I very seldom think about now.
Katie Crouch did a wonderful job in capturing Sarah's childhood. The ending is good, however, it is my opinion that the ending should have been very different. I was really not expecting it to end the way it did.
Summary of Girls in Trucks
Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks.)But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps
When life's complications become overwhelming, Sarah returns home to confront with matured eyes the motto "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia"- and to see how much fuller life can be, for good and for ill, among those who know you best.
Girls in Trucks introduces an irresistable, sweet, and wise voice that heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent.
Katie Crouch's debut novel, Girls in Trucks, is the hilarious, heartbreaking tale of Sarah Walters, a Southern debutante whose endless quest for love and fulfillment takes her around the world and back again. Orbiting Sarah is a cast of characters whose misadventures keep the story moving, even as readers grow frustrated with our heroine's inability to rise above her self-destructive tendencies and see the proverbial light.
We first meet Sarah and her friends Charlotte, Bitsy and Annie at the Charleston Cotillion Training School, where you're not allowed to dance with your cousin under any circumstances, and students are strictly forbidden from dancing the Shag. Sarah, who lives in the shadow of her brilliant, beautiful sister Eloise, is a reluctant debutante at best, and unsurprisingly heads East for college. She eventually lands in New York City, where she slaves away as an editorial assistant and ruins an impressive number of relationships with nice, and not so nice guys. Woven into Sarah's tales of romantic woe are Bitsy, Charlotte and Annie's struggles with infidelity, addiction and low self esteem, respectively. What saves this novel from becoming a cliched tale of failed romance and Southern excess is Crouch's amazing wit, which magically appears every time her characters' self-loathing threatens the affection we inevitably develop for each woman:
I loved the neighborhood: tiny streets peppered by angry painters with peacock-colored fingertips and sturdy women from Sicily clutching armfuls of warm bread. It took us a while to shed our Southern ways, but after a few months we figured out that one's natural height should not be enhanced by one's bangs.
Crouch's sharp wit and keen insight into the dynamics between mothers and daughters, sisters, friends and lovers make her an exciting newcomer to the Southern fiction genre. --Gisele Toueg
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