Girls in Trucks, by Katie Crouch **

Sarah Walters, the narrator of GIRLS IN TRUCKS, is a reluctant Camellia Society debutante. She has always felt ill-fitted to the rococo ways of Southern womanhood and family, and is anxious to shake the bonds of her youth. Still, she follows the traditional path laid out for her. This is Charleston, and in this beautiful, dark, segregated town, established rules and manners mean everything.

But as Sarah grows older, she finds that her Camellia lessons fail her, particularly as she goes to college, moves North, and navigates love and life in New York. There, Sarah and her group of displaced deb sisters try to define themselves within the realities of modern life. Heartbreak, addiction, disappointing jobs and death fail to live up to the hazy, happy future promised to them by their Camellia mothers and sisters.

When some unexpected bumps in the road--an unplanned birth, a family death--lead Sarah back home, she's forced to take another long look at the fading empire of her youth. It takes a strange turn of events to finally ground Sarah enough to make some serious choices. And only then does she realize that as much as she tried to deny it, where she comes from will always affect where she ends up. The motto of her girlhood cotillion society, "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia," may turn out to have more wisdom and pull to it than she ever could have guessed.

I can't say I loved this one. Each chapter tells a story about a debutant as she progresses from high school to her 30's, during which she drinks too much, does drugs and sleeps with a lot of men. The first chapter (story) seemed kind of funny, but they went down hill from there. The stories told in the chapters seemed kind of random and without reason - one is a letter that an otherwise minor character leaves behind for her cheating husband after she dies. I kept waiting for something to happen that would explain what had come before, or tie things together. It never happened.

I didn't like the main character, and didn't really like the supporting characters. There was no underlying plot that caught and held my attention... it seemed a lot more like a collection of tales from a frat house than a story of a debutant.