Search - The Last Girls

Chic lit through and through...old college chums of a certain age going on a reunion cruise on an old-style river boat, renewing old friendships,new adventures, walking down memory lane...it is a good one.

In the brisk and readable The Last Girls, acclaimed Southern writer Lee Smith reunites four college suitemates on a boat tour of the mighty Mississippi. Thirty-five years before, inspired by reading Twain's Huckleberry Finn in class (a detail not nearly revisited enough), the women floated down the same river on a manmade raft; now they are gathered at the request of their recently deceased ringleader's husband. The story unfolds through the eyes of each woman as the old friends weave college memories with their own dramas spanning the three decades since graduation. Harriet, Courtney, Catherine, and Anna come through muddily compared to their dead friend Baby. Even in death, Baby, a Sylvia Plath-like creature with voracious appetites for poetry, self-mutilation, and sex, nearly overwhelms her more reticent friends with past behaviors better suited to a mental institution than a dorm room. As the tour boat bobs along in the wake of these women's emotional crises, Smith offers up the contemporary female life experience, fivefold. At its heart, this is a book about how we never quite outgrow the past, even after plenty of chances to do otherwise.

Rich and delicious....the story of four women....years ago, they were girls, not women---the last generation of American females to be called "girls"---who traveled down the Mississippi River...on a makeshift raft while they were on summer vacation...There were twelve of them on that rip; now there are these four, brought together by tragedy. One of their classmates...has died in an automobile wreck (was it really an accident?), and her husband has asked the old friends to re-create the river journey and scatter her ashes at the mouth of the Mississippi...It's a reunion of classmates with all of the in-between revealed in intimate detail, as only a skilled and classy storyteller can do it.

This is a semi-autobiographical novel with many similarities to the author's own past. Four women take a paddlewheel cruise down the Mississippi to scatter the ashes of one of their former classmates. The cruise repeats in part a raft trip taken thirty years ago by these women plus several others. The story goes between now (1990's) & back then. The characters are fully drawn, and the story shows the 60's lifestyle. There is a surprising amount of humor in some scenes. Some readers may enjoy looking back at 1966 & compare their lives with these women.

This book was selected for one of our book club reads. Normally I would this book was not the best for me and my reading type, however for a book club read I think it was a success. We enjoyed breaking down the characters and discussing plot. Overall I'm glad we picked this.

A great beach read! Girlfriends, you'll enjoy.