Girls in Trucks

"Meet Sarah Walters, a Charleston debutante with questionable manners and an inherited weakness for bad ideas. Sarah's brilliant older sister just dropped out of Yale to run off with an unstable graduate student from Africa. Her beautiful mother lectures her incessantly on the importance of good etiquette but tends to act cold and mysterious after she's had her nightly gin. Still, Sarah tries to follow the rules set by the Camellia Society, the creators of the debutante code. After all, this is Charleston. Decorum means everything." "But it's not easy to be good, particularly in those summers when she and her friend run into wild Island boys in pickup trucks. When Sarah heads north to college and New York, she finds a world very different from the one promised to her by the Camellias. The girls don't say "ma'am"; the boys don't act like gentlemen. And then there's love, which comes to Sarah in the form of Max, a passionate yet emotionally closed older man who leads Sarah to her dark side and then leaves her alone to find her way back." "Events bring Sarah home to Charleston and give her a good, fresh look at her beginnings. The revelation of her mother's secret - one of many sights now plain to Sarah's eyes - shows her that the motto of her girlhood, "Once a Camellia, always a Camellia," has more truth to it than she had ever guessed."--BOOK JACKET.Crouch, Katie is the author of 'Girls in Trucks', published 2008 under ISBN 9780316002110 and ISBN 0316002119.