Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch -- Book Review

I went to Cotillion Training School for the same reason my friends went: my mother wanted me to. This was important to her, the same way it was important to have a picture of her great-great-grandfather dressed in Confederate gray over the sideboard and for us not to be seen in Dad's truck when we were in town.

I was packing for Spring Break and trying to decide which books, out of my large TBR pile, I should carry home. I had four books started and needed to pick a few more, so I thought I would read the first page or two of the other books in the stack to decide.

Oh, the best laid plans...

I read the first 100 pages of Girls in Trucks before convincing myself to put it down and finish packing. The writing is wonderful. From the beginning I connect with Sarah. She's done the perfect daughter thing, now she wants to live her own life. The only problem is, she's not very good at it. She dates the wrong guys and can't seem to land that job she wants in New York. Life just isn't lining up like it's supposed to.

But when does life ever really go as planned, and do we want it to? I think that's what this book gets at. Everyone has goals, ideas of what their life will be like, but what happens when things don't work out? Do we change plans, or ourselves?

"Being unfaithful to yourself is not as hard as you'd think. I will never compromise myself for someone else, I always thought. I'll kill myself first. But it's so easy. It's like wearing earplugs. It's as if you've put your head under the pillow during a thunderstorm, so that all you can hear is the faint sound of muffled rain."

Girls in Trucks spans somewhere around three decades, I think, and is written more in pieces than as a novel. Sometimes I had to stop and reread to figure out how old Sarah was, which could be frustrating. The end frightened me as well, because I thought, for about 15 pages, that the author had written this great book and then was going to end it with a trite wrap-up, but she avoids that trap nicely.

This turned out to be a great read, up to all the hype I'd seen, and I can't wait for Crouch's next book.

On a sidenote: DON'T READ THE JACKET COPY. It gives too much away. Trust me, just start reading--you'll be a hundred pages in before you realize it.

Buy Girls in Trucks from amazon.com

Katie Crouch talks about her book and her experiences as a Southern gal living in New York City:



(Does she look a little like Debra Messing from Will and Grace to anyone else?)