Book #5: The Last Girls

Title: The Last Girls
Author: Lee Smith

Yesterday was a rainy Saturday. We had nothing on the agenda, and I spent most of the day reading this book. It's really a perfect rainy Saturday book or beach book-- interesting enough, reads quickly, fairly engrossing story, nothing too deep. Sort of like a chick-flick in book format.

The Last Girls is the story of five women who meet at college and reunite 35 years later, after the death of one of the women. The four remaining women take a week-long cruise down the Mississippi and present public faces which hide a lot about their inner lives. And although there are other themes I could focus on in this book, it seems like the public face/private sorrow thing is what I'll remember most from the book.

The five women were best friends in college. They lived together, knew almost everything about each other, and slowly lost track of each other. When they reunite, each has endured private sorrows over the years, but no one talks about the hard things that have happened to them. I get the sense at the end of the book that they'll all return to their own lives and not try to maintain the friendships at all.

When I was in college, I felt like I knew everything about my roommates. Slowly, over the years, most of us have grown apart. I hope that if we all got together for a week, we'd let our guards down a little bit. I like to think that if we were together, cruising down the Mississippi, we'd be laughing, bellying up to the dessert buffet, sharing the good and not-so-good of our lives and skinny dipping in the river all the way.

Up next: I'm 60 pages into the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but picking up fun books at the library tomorrow.

--originally published 1/29/06