Girls In Trucks

This book was recommended to me by a friend. She read it and loved it, and usually our tastes in books are similar, so I didn’t think twice about picking this book up at the library.

Here’s the blurb:

Meet Sarah Walters, a Charleston debutante with questionable manners and an inherited weakness for bad ideas. Sarah’s brilliant older sister just dropped out of Yale to run off with an unstable graduate student from Africa. Her beautiful mother lectures her incessantly on the importance of good etiquette but tends to act cold and mysterious after she’s had her nightly gin. Still, Sarah tries to follow the rules set by the Camellia Society, the creators of the debutante code. After all, this is Charleston. Decorum means everything.

But it’s not easy to be good, particularly in those summers when she and her friend run into wild Island boys in pickup trucks. When Sarah heads north to college and New York, she finds a world very different from the one promised to her by the Camellias. The girls don’t say “ma’am”; the boys don’t act like gentlemen. And then there’s love, which comes to Sarah in the form of Max, a passionate yet emotionally closed older man who leads Sarah to her dark side and then leaves her alone to find her way back.

Events bring Sarah home to Charleston and give her a good, fresh look at her beginnings. The revelation of her mother’s secret - one of many sights now plain to Sarah’s eyes - shows her that the motto of her girlhood, “Once a Camellia, always a Camellia,” has more truth to it than she had ever guessed.

I was expecting this book to have the Southern charm that I love so much, and I got something completely different. I enjoyed the first part of the book, and slowly the story just got so complicated. It felt like the author just jammed numerous sub-plots as fillers, and to me it took away from the main story. As for Sarah, the main character, I thought as a child she had potential, and her character as a teen was strong but somehow she loses all her self esteem and self respect as a adult. Argh! She's one of those heroines that you want slap across the head and say "Snap out of it!".

Bottom line, I thought the book was a waste of my time. I should have been reading something else.

Girls In Trucks by Katie Crouch (2/5) General Fiction; Published: Little, Brown & Company 3/2008; New Author; 100 + Reading Challenge(55); Library book;