Girls in Trucks
by Katie Crouch
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Book Reviews of Girls in Trucks
Book Review: Review
Summary: 3 Stars
Sarah Walters hails from Charleston. The heart of where girls learn to become ladies at cotillions, courtesy of the South Carolina Society Hall. The Society Hall is really considered more of a dancing school. It is at the Hall that both young ladies and young men learn how to dance The Waltz, Fox Trot, Lindy Hop, Rumba, and the Cha-Cha but not the Shag. You can scratch off your list of ever learning how to dance the Shag.
Charleston and its traditions are maintained by the Camellia Society. Sarah may be raised to act like a debutante but she is the farthest from acting like an actual debutante. Many years have passed and Sarah is now ready to head off to college. She leaves Charleston for New York "The Big Apple". It is once Sarah is there that she receives the culture shock of her life. The girls dress in pants and the boys make advances toward the women. Sarah adjusts to her life fairly quickly. She even falls for an older man. Unfortunately things don't work out and Sarah is left picking up the broken pieces of her heart and running as fast as she can back home.
Girls in Trucks is the debut novel from author, Katie Crouch. This book can be considered a good coming of age story. What I enjoyed the most was Sarah. This surprised me as I didn't think I would; reading that Sarah was a debutante. The reason I liked her so much is because Sarah did not act like one but instead was just a normal girl trying to get by in the world. Plus another aspect I liked about Sarah was when she got introduced to the outside world away from Charleston. She did not act appalled. She embraced the situation with both feet.
Book Review: *SO* Disappointing
Summary: 1 Stars
*SO* disappointing. I was really, really, looking forward to reading this book. The level of disconnect between the book summary and the actual plot is so huge that I'm tempted to believe that someone just made up the summary based on a third-hand description of the book. When a book is billed as being having "more gasps, sobs, laughs, and surprises in [its] pages than in most people's entire bookshelves", then I expect it to deliver! Instead, I got depressing tripe.
The plot is poorly constructed, with a wafer thin premise. Plot lines are introduced and never mentioned again. The characters are ALL unlikable. The writing is almost unreadable at times, with multiple changes in voice, POV, etc. Now I'm mad I actually finished reading the stupid thing. I'm not quite at the White Oleander lever of hate yet, though it's pretty close. It's a waste of a good summary, good title and a great cover shot.
And do you know what my biggest pet peeve about is?? This books bills itself as being about a southern girl and "the south". The main character- and all of her friends- spend the entire book talking about how much they hate the south, their upbringing, figuring out ways to not be southern, as if it's a bad thing.
Is it wrong to say that I should have known something was up when I saw that the author was born and raised in Charleston, went to college in the north and now lives in San Francisco?
Book Review: The Unexamined Life
Summary: 3 Stars
Good writing, a page-turner, but there is no there there. After reading this book I feel I finally understand what the word slacker means. Sarah Walters, from Charleston, South Carolina, narrates this story about her girlhood through to her early thirties. She's into substance abuse and unkind men. The contrast of her affluent southern belle upbringing with her down and dirty lifestyle is handled with clever wit. But, the story is told too much on the surface, for me. It is a solipsistic tale, except there is no real tale--more a series of seemingly workshopped vignettes, or like a decoupage--a collage of scenes with a veneer of shellac. There are no interiors. It's as if Crouch takes the fiction writer's maxim "show don't tell" over the top and we have no idea, ever, what anyone is feeling. I found a riff on the Chinese to be offensive, even if it was triggered by Sarah's ex dating an Asian woman. One hopes it was meant to be ironic but because there is no reflection or interior expression, one can't know for sure. Equally, when Sarah and her boyfriend think it's hilarious to rent a car and drive onto the highway when they are both stoned, drinking beer and neither of them has driven in a year, it appears the reader is supposed to find this funny, too. There is writing talent here, but not enough sense of story or character. I'd be interested to see what Crouch does next, unless it's more of the same.Book Review: A Teen's Point of View...
Summary: 4 Stars
Girls in Trucks begins with a young Sarah, who is still going through Cotillion Training School with a group of "friends" (Charlotte, Bitsy, and Annie) but for the most part are really just the people she finds herself always going back too in times of need.
As time goes on, Sarah begins to face the challenges of life that most people meet: trying to keep a guy that she can actually settle down with, finding a good job, dealing with death, and most importantly, looking for the meaning and purpose of her life.
Girls in Trucks hops along through Sarah's life, dealing with various significant moments in each chapter. For the most part, the book is told in Sarah's point of view, but we do have some instances when the chapters are told in third person or in another person's point of view entirely.
I enjoyed this book immensely and I think it was a wonderful debut! The idea behind the story is not original, but the way the story is told, however, is very unique and keeps you reading along. My favorite part of the book is that it didn't just deal with one year or even just a few years. You get to see Sarah grow up in a short amount of time, rooting for her to find her way as you go. Highly recommended for girls in their late teens and up!
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Book Review: What a Let down
Summary: 2 Stars
Besides the fact that Katie Crouch has a great name, this book left something to be desired. Sarah Walters is a Southern debuttante (literally, she is - the first story is about how she and her friends are at cotillion dancing class) who lives in the shadow of her beautiful, Yale-educated, smart sister Eloise. She eventually moves to New York where she attempts to jumpstart her career as an editorial assistant (to her, that means a slave). During the novel, she enters into relationships with some nice and not so nice guys.
I got through this whole book and got done with it and didn't feel like I ever learned anything about these women, except that each of them had really bad parts of their lives - the kind of bad things in their lives that peopel that have real problems aren't going to buy into. I didn't connect to any of the women at all. Perhaps I would have if I felt like I had gotten to know them. The writing style was fantastic - I really enjoyed it because it was sharp and witty. It was the only reason why I finished the book because there wasn't really a plot. This was more of a collection of short stories about these friends. It is a quick, easy read - more of a beach read than a real, substantive book.