Girls in Trucks

Girls in Trucks
by Katie Crouch

Girls in Trucks
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Book Summary Information

Author: Katie Crouch
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); 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: points for writing only
Summary: 2 Stars

This author knows how to use words ... but that's about the only good thing I can think to say about this book. (Of course, the POV changes were distracting and odd.) I was intrigued by the setting (I love to read a book where the author brings his/her locale to life), but since most of the book took place in New York and most of the Southern references were negative, even that didn't work for me. The protagonist is a victim who has no aspirations and no love--which is the opposite of how I strive to be and who I like to read about. Give me an overcomer, not a loser. And she is surrounded by a cloud of characters who are mean, empty, hopeless, just like her. There are numerous raunchy sex scenes and an overload of drug and alcohol references. I nearly quit reading many times, but stuck with it because the cover copy was so good, and I kept thinking she's going to turn her life around. All that said, I would read another book by this author IF I knew she was tackling beautiful and inspiring topics. She has a lot of potential.

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 South Carolina for a life in New York City. There, she and her fellow displaced Southern friends try to make sense of city sophistication, to understand how much of their training applies to real life, and how much to the strange and rarefied world they've left behind.
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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