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A review by mattlefevers
Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch
2.0
It's difficult for me to extricate my feelings about this book from my feelings about its main character.
The book: well-written, with a light but poetic touch. Very engaging, drew me in right away and kept me wanting to finish. The chapters are broken up in an interesting way, almost post-modern: each chapter has a different style, and you might finish one that is written in third person, in large blocky paragraphs, only to start the next one and find yourself in first-person, broken up into bite-sized snippets of text. One short chapter (by far the most intriguing) seems to be written in second-person, future tense, from the point of view of a dead woman. Describing the layout like this makes this book sound really avant-garde but it's not, at all - the story is pure young-Southern-woman-coming-of-age and not very out-there at all. Very interesting authorial decision to structure this in such a unique way just to tell a fairly plain story.
The character: Sarah Walters is kind of hateful. She appears to be willfully unhappy, moving through a series of relationships and trying her hardest to ruin every one. She is either pining after cruel, dismissive guys that are obviously terrible from the moment she meets them, leaving the reader wondering what the allure is, or dating good, reliable men and sulking about it for no clear reason. She is the epitome of that person everyone knows who keeps insisting they have terrible luck and just can't catch a break, while making profoundly awful decisions that are designed to keep them miserable. You don't get to ruin every good relationship in your life out of boredom or ennui and then complain about being alone. That is not sympathetic.
I stayed with this book, in part due to the good writing, and in part hoping for some kind of redemption, a narrative arc that would take the spoiled, selfish, mean-spirited protagonist to a place where she could find or offer love. There wasn't really any such arc. We witness twenty or thirty years of this woman's life and she ends up the same as she began: flighty and morose, prone to run from anything good and complain about the bad hand the universe dealt her.
Much like Rainbow Rowell's "Eleanor and Park", I feel like this is a great novel somewhat ruined by a hateful main character that deserves everything she gets. You have got to have some redeeming qualities, man. Even Walter White sometimes did the right thing.
The book: well-written, with a light but poetic touch. Very engaging, drew me in right away and kept me wanting to finish. The chapters are broken up in an interesting way, almost post-modern: each chapter has a different style, and you might finish one that is written in third person, in large blocky paragraphs, only to start the next one and find yourself in first-person, broken up into bite-sized snippets of text. One short chapter (by far the most intriguing) seems to be written in second-person, future tense, from the point of view of a dead woman. Describing the layout like this makes this book sound really avant-garde but it's not, at all - the story is pure young-Southern-woman-coming-of-age and not very out-there at all. Very interesting authorial decision to structure this in such a unique way just to tell a fairly plain story.
The character: Sarah Walters is kind of hateful. She appears to be willfully unhappy, moving through a series of relationships and trying her hardest to ruin every one. She is either pining after cruel, dismissive guys that are obviously terrible from the moment she meets them, leaving the reader wondering what the allure is, or dating good, reliable men and sulking about it for no clear reason. She is the epitome of that person everyone knows who keeps insisting they have terrible luck and just can't catch a break, while making profoundly awful decisions that are designed to keep them miserable. You don't get to ruin every good relationship in your life out of boredom or ennui and then complain about being alone. That is not sympathetic.
I stayed with this book, in part due to the good writing, and in part hoping for some kind of redemption, a narrative arc that would take the spoiled, selfish, mean-spirited protagonist to a place where she could find or offer love. There wasn't really any such arc. We witness twenty or thirty years of this woman's life and she ends up the same as she began: flighty and morose, prone to run from anything good and complain about the bad hand the universe dealt her.
Much like Rainbow Rowell's "Eleanor and Park", I feel like this is a great novel somewhat ruined by a hateful main character that deserves everything she gets. You have got to have some redeeming qualities, man. Even Walter White sometimes did the right thing.