The Last Girls | 
 enlarge | Author: Lee Smith
Publisher: Highbridge Audio
Category: Book
List Price: $36.95
Buy New: $25.22
You Save: $11.73 (32%)
New (10) from $25.22
Avg. Customer Rating:  65 reviews
Sales Rank: 437365
Format: Abridged, Audiobook, Unabridged
Media: Audio CD
Edition: Abridged
Number Of Items: 10
Pages: 30
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 6.1 x 5 x 1.4
ISBN: 1565117026
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781565117020
ASIN: 1565117026
Publication Date: October 14, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new audibook delivered direct from our US warehouse in 3-6 days (Expedited) or 10-14 days (Standard). Expedited shipping recommended for speedy delivery. Over 1 million satisfied customers.
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
In the brisk and readable The Last Girls, acclaimed Southern writer Lee Smith reunites four college suitemates on a boat tour of the mighty Mississippi. Thirty-five years before, inspired by reading Twain's Huckleberry Finn in class (a detail not nearly revisited enough), the women floated down the same river on a manmade raft; now they are gathered at the request of their recently deceased ringleader's husband. The story unfolds through the eyes of each woman as the old friends weave college memories with their own dramas spanning the three decades since graduation. Harriet, Courtney, Catherine, and Anna come through muddily compared to their dead friend Baby. Even in death, Baby, a Sylvia Plath-like creature with voracious appetites for poetry, self-mutilation, and sex, nearly overwhelms her more reticent friends with past behaviors better suited to a mental institution than a dorm room. As the tour boat bobs along in the wake of these women's emotional crises, Smith offers up the contemporary female life experience, fivefold. At its heart, this is a book about how we never quite outgrow the past, even after plenty of chances to do otherwise. --Emily Russin
Product Description
The Last Girls centers around four middle-aged Southern women who, as students at an idyllic Blue Ridge women's college thirty years before, were inspired by Huckleberry Finn to take their own raft trip down the Mississippi River. Now a tragedy brings them back together for a repeat voyage under very different circumstances--aboard a luxurious cruise steamboat. Through this framework, which can be seen as a modern-day rendition of Mary McCarthy's The Group, Smith explores the nature of romance, the relationship between life and fiction, the relevance of the past to the present, and the unexpected course of women's lives.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 60 more reviews...
 There's a reason this book is so cheap... April 4, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
There was nothing captivating about this book or the characters in it. I struggled through the first 100 pages and literally could not motivate myself to finish it. The writing was extremely poor. There were names of people thrown around, with no depth or personality given to those names. The women that were spoken of in depth were shallow, unrealistic, and completely outside the realm of good character development. I had to read this book for a book club that I belong to and I simply have nothing positive to say. I have never read a novel by Lee Smith before and certainly never will again. This book is marked down on Amazon most likely because word got out about how bad it is and they now need to get rid of their inventory.
 "The Girls" meet "The Group" March 18, 2008
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
Can events experienced early in women's lives really have an effect, either constructive or noxious, on the rest of their lives? This is the primary question address by author Lee Smith in her novel The Last Girls.
In 1966, five Southern college "girls" take a rafting trip down the Mississippi River. Now, 30 years later, they have come together once again to re-enact that fateful trip. The primary difference is that on this trip their mode of transportation is a luxurious steamboat and their primary reason for coming together is to journey to New Orleans and scatter the ashes of one of their fellow rafters, "Baby". As the steamboat trip progresses each "girl" (Harriet, Courtney, Catherine and Anna) reminisces about their days at college, the choices they have made over the ensuing years, and the influence Baby has had on each of their lives right down to the dreams they have either pursued or abandoned.
The raft trip appears to be a metaphor for the trip of discovery that each of us experiences as we "sail" through life, complete with the detours taken in an attempt to avoid crashing on the rocks, the effects of a rough trip on our perceptions, and the enjoyment experienced during those periods of smooth sailing.
Lee Smith has managed to capture the essence of what many women experience as they grow older. At some point each one of us explores the memories that have been tempered by time, revisits all of our youthful desires as well as acknowledging the compromises we've made, have accepted the reality of life while continuing to enjoy the fantasy world of romance novels, and ultimately we have searched for an answer to the question of the relevance of our lives.
 Issues with the details & character relationships August 17, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I didn't really enjoy this book, even though I really wanted to. The story itself could have been so interesting, and I love the idea of the river as a metaphor for the women's lives. I gave it 2 stars for the concept.
BUT: I had real issues with the characters - many other reviewers shared my sentiments so I won't elaborate too much. Mostly, I couldn't figure out why they were friends. Why were Baby and Harriet so close other than that they happened to be roommates? What did they share besides the boyfriend Jeff? (Which was another whole piece of the story that I couldn't believe in at all - Harriet's weird love triangle with Baby and Jeff was pathetic to me, and caused me to not like Harriet or sympathize with her.)
There was never any resolution to the issue of Baby's family. There was shadowy, vague reference to possible abuse, incest, or something - but the subject was dropped and never brought up again. Had this part of the story been more developed, I would have been more interested in her character. In the end, she was still one-dimensional to me.
Also, I found some editing and detail issues to be distracting. The cultural details of the times were either incongruous to me, or lacking in color enough that I sometimes wondered what decade we were in. For example, in the scenes where Courtney is a young mother, there is reference to a red Jeep Cherokee as a family vehicle. That is so much a cultural icon of the late 80's and 90's that it made me wonder if I was interpreting the timing correctly. In the late 60's and early 70's, wouldn't it have been the classic station wagon? Admittedly, this is just one minor detail; but there were several things like this that made me wish the nostalgic details had been more descriptive and more carefully thought out, to give the reader a more vivid picture of the times. I think it was a missed opportunity that would have made the story more transporting to read.
Similarly, I found the names of some of the characters a bit untimely. I had a difficult time believing Harriet's mother (as she was described in the book: unconventional, a free spirit) would have named her Harriet in that day and age, as well as thinking Courtney's name was unlikely for her age. The two names don't seem of the same generation. And "Baby" was such a cliche to me that I was annoyed every time the name appeared in the book, which was of course, a lot. Again, a minor annoyance, but when there are many minor annoyances, a book can get frustrating!
In all, I liked the concept but wish it had played out differently. It wasn't a satisfying book to read, at least for me, a detail-oriented kind of girl.
Glad I bought it off the bargain rack.... April 11, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This wasn't a BAD book, I was able to finish it, but it definitely was not a page-turner that I was unable to put down. I generally like this type of storyline but this one didn't quite make the grade. I would have felt robbed if I had paid original full price for it, maybe even angry. I found myself wanting to finish it just so I could start something else.
Usually I love Lee Smith's books October 30, 2006
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
but this one just seem half done. The characters were interesting and I wanted a better description. Somehow they weren't fleshed out. It was just not like Lee Smith's previous books.
But there were beautiful scenes, wonderful dialogue in places and I almost gasped at some things that seemed so familiar from my youth in the south.
It was however a disappointment.
|
|
|
