Girls in Trucks
Katie Crouch
Little, Brown, 2008
Sarah Walters is a less-than-perfect debutante. She tries hard to follow the time-honored customs of the Charleston Camellia Society, as her mother and grandmother did, standing up straight in cotillion class and attending lectures about all the things that Camellias don't do. (Like ride with boys in pickup trucks). But Sarah can't quite ignore the barbarism just beneath all that propriety, and as soon as she can she decamps South Carolina for a life in New York City. There, she and her fellow displaced Southern friends try to make sense of city sophistication, to understand how much of their training applies to real life, and how much to the strange and rarefied world they've left behind. When life's complications become overwhelming, Sarah returns home to confront with matured eyes the motto "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia"- and to see how much fuller life can be, for good and for ill, among those who know you best. Girls in Trucks introduces a narrative voice that is astonishing and irresistible - a true, sweet, and wise voice that heralds the arrival of an exciting new talent.
"Crouch, with exuberant style and in-depth character development, hones in on the disastrous turns a woman's life can take when she's addicted to men, alcohol and illegal substances. She's created a fresh, effervescent story that takes run-of-the-mill despair and instability and churns them into a memorable tale of good girls and bad choices."
-USA Today
"...Nice girls: they don't ride in pickup trucks. They don't discuss money. The topic of sex, however, is fair game. Girls in Trucks follows Sarah Walters as she graduates from dancing with sweaty-palmed boys in Charleston cotillion classes to sleeping with ill-considered men in New York...She grows up believing she needs a man...and must learn to understand and appreciate who she is, on her own."
-Charlotte Observer
"Delving into personal relationships and diessecting love and family, Crouch reveals you can steer your course without a map."
-Daily Candy(San Francisco)
"Sarah's voice is a funny, slim stiletto to the heart of friendship, desire and love. Her spare prose and sharp dialogue flay open a universal need to belong, whether to a place, a person or your own self."
-The Oregonian
"In the book's final scene, she leaves her characters in a shared moment of new joy, one that may or may not last, no guarantees, just like in life and in good literature."
-The San Francisco Chronicle
"Girls in Trucks is an extraordinary first novel, one that I'm betting will win the heart of every reader who has ever sought love or dodged it, and anyone who just plain likes to read a book that's savvy, funny ans sad, wise, and beautifully written. Wow."
-Josephine Humphreys
"Katie Crouch speaks in a funny, spiky, highly original voice that carries a reader happily along through this charming novel. I enjoyed this book from beginning to end."
-Mark Childress
"There are more gasps, sobs, laughs and surprises in these pages than in most people's entire bookshelves. Love never felt so sharp or real as in Katie Crouch's debut."
-- Andrew Sean Greer
"Readers will be powerless to resist Sarah Walters, the charmingly lusty narrator of Katie Crouch's debut novel. Her Charleston girlhood may have taught her how to be gracious to others, but it's the heartbreaking honesty with which she sizes herself up that makes her one of the funniest, most sympathetic literary heroines in years."
-- Jonathan Dee
"In Girls in Trucks everything is cockeyed and wonderful-- white-gloved drunks and stoned debutantes, the social rules of hot Charleston and icy New York. And at the center of it all Katie Crouch has brought us Sarah Walters, a devastatingly funny character trying to figure out not just how to manage the waltz, the cha-cha and various dances of heartbreak-- but how to stay alive."
-- Victoria Redel, author of Loverboy and The Border of Truth
