30. Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch

Category: 50 Books

30. Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch

Okay, here’s the description from goodreads.com:

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.

 

It’s sounds good, huh? Perhaps it might even be funny?
Well, it wasn’t funny, and the back cover lies about how funny it is. But humor isn’t everything, and I could’ve over looked it’s unhumorousness if I could’ve at LEAST liked the main character, Sarah. She was pathetic, and then, when she gets older and knows that she’s pathetic and remains pathetic? Well, I don’t like that. The book even ends on that note, she’s starting a new relationship to a good guy and she knows she’s going to lose interest and screw it up cos she’s always been into bad guys.

Plus I didn’t like how these important things would happen in the book, for example, her sister goes off to college and is going to marry some guy from Madagascar who is kind of abusive and then, you never hear about what happened with that. But it’s years later and she’s at her sister’s wedding (not to the Madagascar guy) and then you never hear about the sister again. Or like where her pal Charolotte, who was her roommate and best pal for years, has a heroin problem. But it’s only flippantly mentioned in a, “and that’s why i haven’t talked to her in years.” There were several plot points like that that should’ve either been fleshed out more or eliminated from the book completely.

There was one part, a really small part, where all of a sudden the book is being told from someone else’s point of view. And I mean, I got it, right? I understood who it was supposed to be and all, but since she didn’t do that with any of the other Camelias (that I ever picked up on) it seemed really out of place. But that one part would have made a good short story, just you know, not a good chapter in this book.

So I dunno, the main character was just so selfish and self-destructive and it doesn’t seem like she will try to change, and I would’ve like to have seen some personal growth is all. Lesson, is all I’m sayin’. But that’s what I get from choosing books by their covers.


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