Review : Girls in Trucks
Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch
Pages : 241
Genre : Fiction
My Rating : 
What a difficult review to write! It cannot be an objective one, for more reasons than one. I had read so many reviews of this book beforehand that it was difficult getting those out of my mind while I read.
Surprisingly, Girls in Truck wasn’t as bad as I first thought it would be. The ratings on various reading communities have been, lets be honest here, less than stellar. On LibraryThing, it scored a 2.86 average, and a 2.82 on Goodreads. Now, I know not to give too much importance to those, but it can be a good indicator of the general opinion. Still, I had to see for myself; I liked the cover, the title, the summary. It was a short read, too; why not give it a try?
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.
In my opinion, the major flaw to this book is the inconsistent narrator. From one chapter to the other, it alternates from first-person to third-person. At some point, you even have another first-person narrator than Sarah, or you have Sarah narrating events where she wasn’t present. With the change of narration style, each chapter brings the reader in another time and place. Also, there is no follow-up to some of the characters stories, which I found to be unsatisfying.
Not only Sarah Walters is an inconsistent narrator, she is also, I thought, a not really engaging one. Her story begins with numerous hints of humor, but those disappear as quick as her alcool and cigarette’s consumption increases – and sadly, nothing is resolved in the end. I wanted to reach through the pages, grab Sarah by the shoulders and shake her until she decided to do something with herself, but she didn’t seem to want to.
Crouch’s writing isn’t bad, though. I enjoyed it, and I think she writes the best in the lighter passages. She could probably write a good chicklit novel. Sadly, the disparities between the chapters make this book feel more like a collection of essays than a novel. I’d say the book cover is misleading; the image has some peaceful quality to it, while the story is, in fact, quite negative. Don’t look to this book for some good role models, either; after reading it, you’ll probably think that every man on Earth is either violent and/or weak and/or a cheater, and I promise you that the women don’t do better.
In the end, I’m glad I got to read it to make my own mind, but sadly, this book certainly won’t make my list of 2009’s top reads.
Too bad this one was a flop, but sometimes it’s good to read this stuff for yourself so you can make up your own mind. As you said, it was a short read, so at least you didn’t waste too much time on it.
Exactly! I always fear I will miss a good book if I listen to people hating it – the same way I sometimes read bad books just because they were so popular!
Had it been really bad, I would probably just have stopped reading after 50 pages; it wasn’t a bad book, it just wasn’t great.