In the summer of 1965, twelve girls from a women's college, inspired by reading Huckleberry Finn in an American literature class, decide to recreate his ride down a raft on the Mississippi.  Thirty-four years later, four of them - Harriet, Courtney, Anna, and Catherine - agree to meet on a steamboat cruise from Memphis to New Orleans, to spread the ashes of a fifth, their former roommate/suitemate, Baby (aka Margaret).  She had died recently in a car wreck, and her widower had requested that they do this.

The cruise provides the framework for their reminisces of that 1965 trip (and other college activities), as well as their own individual pasts and presents.  Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of a different girl, and there are even some chapters told from the viewpoint of Russell, Catherine's third husband, who came with her on the trip.

Harriet is a college teacher, never married.  Courtney's still married to the man she dropped out of college to wed, but he's cheated on her for years - so she's also had a long-standing affair going on.  Anna is divorced and a successful romance writer, and Catherine is a sculptor.  Harriet and Anna were scholarship students, while the other three came from wealthy families.

All of the women are Southerners (from Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina), and the cruise of course is in the deep South, and writing about Southerners and the South is author Lee Smith's forte.  The novel was inspired by a similar raft trip she took with Hollins College classmates in 1966, although she makes clear in the acknowledgments (page 383) that the book is "truly fiction....but the idea of river journey as metaphor for the course of women's lives has intrigued me for years."

They're the "last girls," because, according to Harriet (page 71), "they'd call us women in the newspaper if it [the raft trip] happened now."

I enjoyed this book.  I could relate to the characters to some extent, despite being about 12 years younger.  I went to an all-girls high school in Houston, where many of the girls were wealthy, but I was on scholarship.  Our high school still offered home economics classes then (they haven't for some time).  There was a group of eight to ten of us who were close in high school and college, but drifted apart as we got older - especially in my case, as I was the one who didn't return to our hometown after college, eventually living over 2000 miles away for over 20 years.  Like the women in the book, I wasn't especially close to any of these girls 34 years later.

I also enjoyed the snippets of a cruise experience in the book, and could relate to those.  Although I've never been on a Mississippi riverboat cruise (but would like to go), the Caribbean and Hawaii cruises I've been on had a lot of similarities.  Particularly funny was the couple who shared a dinner table with the five women and Russell (who, by the way, was a hoot).

I did at times have trouble following the quick switches between past and present in the chapters, and I don't understand why Smith felt a need to add a chapter at the end (after the end of the cruise) that summarized the lives of the other seven girls on the 1965 raft trip.  And I also felt the book left some questions - what did Harriet and Courtney end up doing in New Orleans - and how did Baby really die? ( )

Listened to on audio. Couldn't get into it. ( )

Not my favorite book about friendship that's for sure. They were college roommates but didn't seem to really like each other when they were on their way on a cruise to New Orleans to throw the ashes of their friend "Baby."

I'm not saying I was bored but it wasn't very interesting to me either when they were in college in 1965 nor in the present on the ship in 1999. The women seemed older than they really were for some reason to me. The plot went back and forth between 1965 and the present 1999.

The ending was so confusing to me and have no idea to the women she was referring to since they weren't in the plot and I'm not sure if they were offspring of the women since only one had children. ( )

3.5 stars rounded down.

I had real reservations opening this book. I had loved my introduction to Lee Smith so much and I heard from several sources that this book was not going to live up to my expectations at all. Agreed, this is no Fair and Tender Ladies, a book that will live in my heart and mind forever, but it is a good, solid read with an engrossing story and characters that seemed real and three-dimensional.

While in college, a group of girls decided to ride a raft, ala Huckleberry Finn, down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Four of them have come back together many years later to honor the passing of the fifth and take another voyage down the river, albeit in a more comfortable style. The book is both a glimpse into who they were as college girls and who they have become as women. If you have ever belonged to a group of friends and then moved on from them, but have never forgotten, you cannot help liking this book just on its face. I don’t think it hurts that the time period is one I feel connected to as well.

I have heard it said that the friends of our youth are the closest friends we will ever have, and I believe this to be true. Certainly it has been so for me. The boys of my childhood are the men I rely on now. For at no later time are we ever so open, so ready to offer up all that we have and all that we are, to allow others real access into our very souls. The friendships we make in later life are friendships of a different order, it seems to me.

These girls/women are not all the same, but they are all uniquely Southern, and this is something that Lee Smith knows about and portrays well. You might wonder that two very poor girls would end up rooming with girls who are rolling in daddy’s money, but I assure you it can happen. As a freshman, I was assigned a dorm room with a girl who was straight from the ritziest part of Atlanta, her house being a few doors down from the Governor’s Mansion. I was a lower middle-class scholarship student, who worked an on-campus job. She was refined and easy with everything; I was scared and out of my depth, and I we got on famously...one of the sweetest, least snobby people I have ever known in my lifetime. I think that experience may well explain why I sank into these relationships without any reluctance at all.

I found the backstory more interesting than the current one, which seems always to be the case when I read books with varying timelines. The end was a bit anticlimactic, but it would have been very difficult to have written an end to this story that made sense and wouldn’t have been so. All in all, a good effort, and a confirmation that I should continue to read Lee Smith’s books, which is good news since I have two more slated for 2019.
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I enjoyed this book, although clearly "chick lit". ( )