The Last Girls
Ratings2
Average rating2.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating2.5
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.
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“Every true story ends terribly, if you follow it far enough....”
Four women head off to recreate a trip down the Mississippi they first took many years ago when they were girls in college. The four gather at the behest of the husband of Baby, one of the original group of girls, a girl who had a strong influence on the lives of all the women, and who has just died unexpectedly in a tragic accident.
The four quirky women, the Last Girls of the title, Southerners one and all, use the trip to reminisce about the past, to contemplate the accomplishments and regrets of their lives, and to offer sympathy and support for each other.
Better-than-average Baby-Boomer women's fiction, with strong characters and strong writing. Be warned that the others in my bookgroup complained about the way in which the story abruptly jumps from character to character and from the past to the present.
