Rating: 
Summary: Shallow Lives Do Not Great Fiction Make
Review: Lee Smith's The Last Girls proves to be a highly tedious book. Except possibly for the character of Harriet, all of her characters are shallow and utterly underserving of any "literary" treatment, if that's what you want to call it. Here and there, Smith manages to provide some semblance of developed characterization that doesn't offend one's sensibility, but then she blurts out some insipid dialogue from peripheral characters that add nothing to the lives of the characters who are supposed to matter in the story. The multiple point of view narrative has nothing to do with any effort to expand the limits of storytelling, but more with a total lack of narrative ability on the part of Smith. Her rambling stucture only heightens what an inept novelist she is. It's painful to think her book has been lauded in reviews when really what she has created is a sorry excuse for fiction. In the end, all of the characters remain flat and the banality of their lives and self-centered problems beyond the pale of ridiculous. And, please, who ever said Smith should attempt to include poetry in her fiction. This book is an insult to readers.
Rating: 
Summary: rafting down the mighty mississippi
Review: old friends relive a raft trip they took during senior year in high school. you find out what happened to each character after the raft trip and how they finally come to terms with it as older adults traveling on a steamboat down the Mississippi so many years later. a good read.
Rating: 
Summary: boring women, boring book
Review: _The Last Girls_ is loosely based on Lee Smith's own raft trip down the Mississippi with some friends from college. But for a rich subject and a metaphoric theme with such potential, Lee drops anchor (as one of the raft's "crew" did in the article at the beginning of the book) and can't seem to get moving.In 1965, 12 girls from the southern Mary Scott College, while studying _Huckleberry Finn_, decide to take their own raft trip down the river (unfortunately this was rarely discussed). Thirty four years later, the most dynamic and troubled of the friends ("Baby" Ballou) is dead, and her husband asks the four women who were closest to Baby to take a trip down the river again, in a cruise ship this time, to dispose of some of Baby's ashes near New Orleans. The four women have not been in touch, and have embarked upon lives none of them would have expected. Imagine _Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood_ meets _The Big Chill_, but not as interesting as either one. Harriet, with a personality befitting her name, was Baby's best friend and has put her personal life completely on hold since her college days. Courtney married into wealth but is predictably miserable. Anna has become a famous romance novelist. And Catherine is on her third husband. Their current lives are interspersed with stories from the past, and it can be hard to keep track of which character is which, because the women aren't developed fully enough. (The most fleshed-out one is Baby, and she's dead.) Lee's writing never reaches the transcendence which allows the reader to lose themselves in the story, and it feels as though a climax is never reached. At the book's end there is an appendix which discusses what has happened to the other 7 raft-riders which seems completely unnecessary. Ultimately, I found I didn't care about the characters at all, which made _The Last Girls_ a slow and disappointing book.
Rating:
Summary: Awful and hard to actually finish reading
Review: I haven't had this much trouble getting through a book since I was in college. This book is boring and useless. I don't know why Good Morning America endorsed it.
Rating:
Summary: The LOST Girl
Review: I have never tried so hard to get through a book before. I bought this because someone stated they loved it and then Good Morning America had it on it's book club. I thought How bad can it be. It was awful. I was bored and just couldn't wait until the agony was over.
Rating: 
Summary: River reunion
Review: Smith's premise of a trip down the "Mississip" certainly is not a new one as a frame for a story. But this one has a different twist in that it is grown women who do the traveling, four of them, once college suitemates, 35 years earlier, and now reunited in a tourist's tour of the great river. The characters that Smith creates are rich and believable and her obvious understanding of writing genres furthers the development of these would be creative writers in days gone by. Harriet, Anna, Courtney, and Catherine (and Catherine's hubby Russell) come together to recreate their college days' raft trip and to sprinkle the ashes of their rebellious suitemate, Baby, thus honoring her life. Each woman's life in relationship to Baby, while in college at Virginia's Mary Scott College, serves as the means for getting to know Baby. But Smith makes sure that we see the poignancy in their lives after Mary Scott revealing the women they have become. This book entices the reader to keep on reading, to unravel the secrets of Baby and her hold on the lives of her surviving friends. And wonderfully, Smith even sketches out the lives of the women who did not make this second trip in brief summaries at the end of the main story. This novel falls into the category of those good, fast reads about Southern women, a la Fannie Flagg. What an enjoyable read about women you might just know or might just wish you did!
Rating:
Summary: Average book
Review: My criticisms for the book: The flow of the stories of the past and present with each characters was off. I had a hard time remembering each character and who she "was" and what she was going though. Thus, I didn't become attached to any character. I also didn't like that these girls didn't seem to be that good of friends, they hardly kept in touch! Didn't like the ending. Why are we given an update on several characters that were never mentioned through out the book at all? Could have totally left that out. What I liked: Good plot. And I liked that the characters were all going through different things in their lives. I did feel some suspense for what was going to happen. Overall the book was ok. I've read much better, but it wasn't totally disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: Where is the river?
Review: I don't believe the four women in the book were on that raft on the Mississippi 35 years earlier. Their connection to the river and the adventures they had rings as false as their friendship. The book starts out ok but by the end it is clear that the story is never going to move to a deeper level. I wanted to take a scissors and rip open the boxes the characters put themselves in and refused to break out of. If the description of the silly luxury steamboat entertainment program is correct, that makes me as sad as the empty lives of Anna, Harriet, Courtney and Catherine. Where is the romance, beauty, and mystery of the river?
Rating:
Summary: I enjoyed it a lot
Review: This is a very easy reading book. I am not from the South but I live in the South, so it really made me laugh with some of its descriptions about this area. This book is inspired in a real trip made by 20 girls in the late 60's. The characters are ficticious, but very well detailed. The only thing that I didn't like about this book, is that it leaves too many question unanswered, other than that, you may enjoy it.
Rating:
Summary: So disappointed I couldn't finish it...
Review: Like others, I could not believe this was the same Lee Smith who had written "Fair and Tender Ladies," on the list of my 20 all time favorite books (only 20 over 5 decades of reading!) and "The Devil's Dream." After 110 pages I gave up. The characters were silly and shallow, and indeed, this seemed like a romance novel, not the good literature Lee Smith writes...
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