The last girls : a novel /

In 1965, inspired by reading Huckleberry Finn for a favorite college teacher, a dozen young women took a raft trip down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Thirty-four years later, four of these former Mary Scott College coeds duplicate the trip, this time on a riverboat quite luxurious compared to the craft they used before. Their reunion is not merely a way for them to catch up on each other's lives; they also intend to spread the ashes of one in their group who recently died. There is the ever-repressed Harriet, the flamboyant romance writer Anna, the proper society lady Courtney, and the happily married Catherine, all of them accompanied, of course, by their memories of the irrepressible, irresistible, but manipulative Baby, now deceased. Achieving greater depths of characterization and heights of technique with each succeeding novel, Smith sets out here, as the women themselves set out on their trip, to explore various paths by which women journey from late adolescence to early middle age. With graceful, even brilliant shifts from past to present, Smith builds this absolutely inviting, completely compelling novel around the idea that "whatever you're like in your youth, you're only more so with age." --Brad HooperAdult Books Young adult recommendations in this issue have been contributed by the Booklist staff and by reviewers Nancy Bent, John Charles, Tina Coleman, Diana Tixier Herald, Roberta Johnson, Judy King, Regina Schroeder, Karen Simonetti, Candace Smith, Linda Waddle, and Beth Warrell. Titles recommended for teens are marked with the following symbols: YA, for books of general YA interest; YA/C, for books with particular curriculum value; YA/L, for books with a limited teenage audience; YA/M, for books best suited to mature teens.

The Big Chill meets Huckleberry Finn in a moving novel inspired by a real-life episode. Thirty-six years ago, Smith (Oral History) and 15 other college "girls" sailed a raft down the Mississippi River from Kentucky to New Orleans in giddy homage to Huck. Here she reimagines that prefeminist odyssey, and then updates it, as four of the raft's alumnae take a steamboat cruise in 1999 to recreate their river voyage and scatter the ashes of one of their own. What results is an unsentimental journey back to not-quite-halcyon college days of the mid-1960s ("periods cramps boys dates birth babies the works") masterfully intercut with more recent stories of marriages, infidelities, health crises and career moves, all set firmly in the South. At first the characters threaten to be mere stereotypes: innocent, self-sacrificing Harriet; arty, maternal Catherine; brittle Southern belle Courtney; brassy romance novelist Anna. But Smith reveals surprising truths about each character, even as she suggests that the fate of their departed classmate-the wild, promiscuous, possibly suicidal Baby-may never be understood. The steamboat setting provides ample opportunities to skewer cruise ship tackiness and Southern kitsch, a witty counterpoint to the often troubled personal stories of the passengers. Readers who like their plots linear may be challenged by the tangle of tales, but those who agree that "there are no grown-ups," and that there's "no beginning and no end" to the "real story" of people's lives, will find this tender, generous, graceful novel a delight. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In this latest effort by Southern author Smith (Fair and Tender Ladies), the characters are the "last girls" because they came of age at a women's college in Virginia just as young women ceased to enjoy being referred to as "girls." This group of former coeds, who once traveled down the Mississippi on a raft of their own construction, reunite to make the same trip on a fancy steamboat to scatter the ashes of one departed member. Along the way, we learn the stories of the unmarried Harriet, wealthy romance writer and once-poor West Virginia girl Anna, straying society wife Courtney, and Catherine and husband Russell. Each has had troubles and romances, and as they trace their stories with plentiful flashbacks to their college days, personalities are gradually revealed. This entertaining novel should be popular with readers who enjoy tales of women's lives, but it lacks the sharp edge and grimmer reality of Smith's earlier work. Recommended for popular fiction collections. Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The contrasting virtues of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Eudora Welty's elegiac family reunion novel Losing Battles are neatly conjoined in this entertaining 11th from the popular North Carolina author (The Christmas Letters, 1996, etc.). A reunion brings together several former college roommates and friends, 35 years after the great adventure of their youth: a 1965 trip by raft down the Mississippi River ("Just like Huck and Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"), from Paducah, Kentucky, to New Orleans. Center stage are five of the girls: never-married schoolteacher (and former would-be writer) Harriet Holding, unhappily married Courtney Ralston, thrice-married beauty Catherine Hurt, successful romance novelist Anna "Todd," and the group's wealthy, impulsive golden girl, Margaret "Baby" Ballou-recently deceased, and seen only in the extended flashbacks that Smith skillfully interweaves with the present action. We eventually learn a great deal about each of these five, and the potential for sudsy cliche (Catherine's discovery of a lump in her breast, "perfect" Courtney's disastrous plunge into adultery) is deflected by vivid dialogue and what might be called rhetorical special effects, including several of Baby's narcissistic yet pointedly self-critical poems (one contains the lines "but I'm such a bitch/deep inside/where I hide") and hilarious parodies of the paperback-Gothic sensibility that suffuses both Anna's fiction and her imagined romance with a handsome young steward on The Belle of Natchez (the steamboat on which "the last girls" are reliving their youth). Best of all is Smith's sympathetic characterization of the central figure of Harriet: an intelligent, reserved woman who quietly accepts responsibility for having helped destroy her own happiness, and perhaps also the privileged, ill-fated Baby Ballou's precipitous decline. A bittersweet comedy with a fine sharp edge.