The Last Girls by Shannon Ravenel - Women's Friendship Novel - Perfect for Book Clubs & Beach Reading
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DESCRIPTION
On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls-classmates at a picturesque Blue Ridge women's college-launched their homemade raft (inspired by Huck Finn's) on a trip down the Mississippi. It's Girls A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi read the headline in the Paducah, Kentucky, paper. Thirty-five years later, four of those "girls" reunite to cruise the river again. This time it's on the luxury steamboat, The Belle of Natchez, and there's no publicity. This time, when they reach New Orleans, they'll give the river the ashes of a fifth rafter-beautiful Margaret ("Baby") Ballou. Revered for her powerful female characters, here Lee Smith tells a brilliantly authoritative story of how college pals who grew up in an era when they were still called "girls" have negotiated life as "women." Harriet Holding is a hesitant teacher who has never married (she can't explain why, even to herself). Courtney Gray struggles to step away from her Southern Living-style life. Catherine Wilson, a sculptor, is suffocating in her happy third marriage. Anna Todd is a world-famous romance novelist escaping her own tragedies through her fiction. And finally there is Baby, the girl they come to bury-along with their memories of her rebellions and betrayals. THE LAST GIRLS is wonderful reading. It's also wonderfully revealing of women's lives-of the idea of romance, of the relevance of past to present, of memory and desire.
REVIEWS
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4.5
Although I'm a little older than "the last girls," I lived in the world they came from--a women's college in Virginia--in the mid-1950s. I could identify with all of them in one way or another. Lee Smith has done a marvelous job of "writing about us," the women who came to maturity before the world changed so dramatically with the arrival of the civil rights movement, the women's movement, and the war in Vietnam.And for the reviewer who talked about "rights of passage," may I point out that the term is "rites of passage." Women of my age and a little younger went through a lot of those rites during our college years, and for most of us the rite of marriage was the one we sought most. We, like the girls in the book, had no idea what life and marriage would bring us in the years ahead.I've been a Lee Smith fan for years. I pre-ordered this book and when it arrived I saved it "as a treat" for several days. And a treat it was! Once I started reading it I could hardly bear to put it down. Then a woman friend of about my age borrowed it and we spent hours on the phone comparing notes about the passages that affected us most deeply--and there were several. Now I'm listening to Lee Smith read it on CD, and finding nuances I missed in reading it--the story becomes more aand more compelling as I hear it spoken.
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