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The Last Girls | 
 enlarge | Author: Lee Smith
Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $0.01
You Save: $24.94 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  67 reviews
Sales Rank: 899144
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4
ISBN: 1565124057
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781565124059
ASIN: 1565124057
Publication Date: January 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Thankyou for looking at Bookscorner1. MAY HAVE A REMAINDER MARKNo dust jacket
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Amazon.com Review
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
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 62 more reviews...
 Despite potential - the book just didn't deliver July 7, 2008
Lee Smith has a good idea in mind when this story begins and it seems to kind of get lost and muddled much like the river theme she pushes so hard on the reader. The "roommates" theme is always a safe one where you can introduce different types of people and justify why they get together and how they stay friends despite their different worlds. But to hide so much of their lives from each other - even this many years later is strange. The characters keep telling each other "you don't really know me". Well, problem is we readers do find out more but don't see why they are even friends and makes you wonder why you the reader should care if the characters don't.
As someone else mentioned earlier, some of the seemingly inconsistent details in the book threw me off too. Like saying the character Jeff went to SMI when the author so clearly is putting him right in the middle of the very real VMI which was around long before the 1960's was odd. And she went to such trouble to describe cars and homes and serving items that would fit the times but then added so many other items that were totally out of place and time.
I am a southerner with my 3 best friends being my former college roommates and we live very different lives so the idea is a good one that many can relate to. It just gets lost in back stories that are not connected or even shared with the other characters, a metaphoric boat ride and a raft trip that keeps being brought up and then never really explored, half way believable cliche characters that never really go beneath the surface and a whole host of disposable characters you really come to like and then they are killed off. The Girls mourn their losses and missed opportunities but don't do anything about it except regret it all and keep it from everyone else. I almost wanted to scream every time it was mentioned Harriett blushed at this man or that lunch topic or this missed chance at something. I got it already - the chick is shy! Move on. Or this character had big boobs - or that one likes to write smut novels. I don't need to read the novels or hear about the boobs every other chapter.
It was a decent book - not sorry I read it - but not recommending it unless you are just looking to pass the time and have nothing else to read. It never gets below the surface or picks up momentum though I really hoped it would. And after the book is closed, you are still left with a feeling of well I wish the cliches and tags had come off and the characters had really been explored because there was potential there.
 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.
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