Girls In Trucks by Katie Crouch

Title: Here	Loved it	Graded
Author: Katie Crouch
Genre: Comtemporary
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Elements: Southern
Series: Stand alone

Sarah Walters, the narrator of GIRLS IN TRUCKS, is a reluctant Camellia Society debutante. She has always felt ill-fitted to the rococo ways of Southern womanhood and family, and is anxious to shake the bonds of her youth. Still, she follows the traditional path laid out for her. This is Charleston, and in this beautiful, dark, segregated town, established rules and manners mean everything.

But as Sarah grows older, she finds that her Camellia lessons fail her, particularly as she goes to college, moves North, and navigates love and life in New York. There, Sarah and her group of displaced deb sisters try to define themselves within the realities of modern life. Heartbreak, addiction, disappointing jobs and death fail to live up to the hazy, happy future promised to them by their Camellia mothers and sisters.

When some unexpected bumps in the road--an unplanned birth, a family death--lead Sarah back home, she's forced to take another long look at the fading empire of her youth. It takes a strange turn of events to finally ground Sarah enough to make some serious choices. And only then does she realize that as much as she tried to deny it, where she comes from will always affect where she ends up. The motto of her girlhood cotillion society, "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia," may turn out to have more wisdom and pull to it than she ever could have guessed.

Readers get to follow Sarah Walters from her early innocent years training to be a Southern debutante in Charleston to her adult, jaded years in New York and back again.

This novel doesn't feel like a story somehow, but more of a collection of short stories. It's touching and painful (very painful), even funny, to read about Sarah's misadventures in life. One of the things that really stood out was how much problems Sarah had in her relationships! It's a whirlwind of disasters, from her fixation on an abusive ex-boyfriend to a forced relationship with someone she is not attracted to.

It's not my type of novel. Seeing Sarah's life journey was interesting, but I'd have loved it if Katie Crouch gave us more of an insight into Sarah's thoughts rather than just gloss over the surface of her experiences.

At times Sarah made me so frustrated with how she dealt with things that I wanted to smack her and prompt her to do something. She was just so self destructive! It was like watching a trainwreck: horrifying but you just can't stop watching to see what happens. Other times I wanted to comfort her and tell her that everything was going to be okay.

And the ending? It just didn't seem like enough of a conclusion, but I guess that's just how life is. Still, I can't deny that Katie Crouch has a distinctive style of writing. It's a good novel, but I just wasn't satisfied.