Sarah Walters is a woman who has followed the rules her entire life, like most of us. Unlike most of us, her rules were passed down over generations of Camellias, women at the top-most rung of Charleston's social ladder. It's a public society that's anything but Democratic. Camellias are born, not made: If you're mother is one, then you are. For life. No matter what."'Never chase men or buses,' my mother told me. 'Another one will always come along,'" writes Sarah, whose struggles meeting expectations are what make this book by first-time novelist Katie Crouch so relatable and interesting.
With a slow start that follows Sarah and the three other Camellias her age, Bitsy, Charlotte and Annie, through middle-school Cotillion training, it's clear as the story develops why Crouch spent so much time developing the traditional South Carolina enclave of Sarah's youth.
Sarah as a heroine is a little bland and things happen to her, not with her or by her. She observes the increasingly bizarre sequence of experiences that happen when her domineering older sister moves to Yale, when she and wild-child Charlotte met country boys who lure them away from high-society duties and even when she goes away to a no-name Northern college.
The novel moves into familiar coming-of-age territory when Sarah moves to New York to work in journalism, joined by Charlotte, now in the fashion industry, and Bitsy. This is where she searches for love and where Crouch explores the frighteningly submissive personalities of her heroines. Sarah dates a man who changes her life and accepts, if not encourages, his violent sexual behavior. Bitsy marries a wealthy older man, who is later revealed to be selfish, uncaring and unfeeling. Annie dates men who don't love her. Charlotte, the most sensible, falls in love with mind-altering substances.
I wonder if these women are supposed to represent some aspect of femininity that exists in every woman because something, the fear of being alone or the fear of not being enough or the fear of being unloved, keeps all of them from searching for or choosing healthy relationships.
At one point Sarah remembers what her mother taught her about men, "that no mater what, there's always something. Fall in love and you'll find it. He will steal, or drink, or dress up in your clothes, or die on you at dinner. That's love, she says. That's what you sign up for."Sarah is at her best when she is honest and feeling about the emotions that most of us only occasionally stumble upon. After almost screwing up her sister's wedding she tells her, "'There's a lot wrong with me,'" before continuing with, "I tell her I'm sorry again, which she waves off. I am sort of always sorry. I am sorry for being drunk on her wedding day and for not being good enough for Max and for not being smart enough for her friends and for breaking her toe with a hockey stick when I was twelve. God, I am sorry. I am sorry for so many things that I should go outside and swim to Cuba."
Emotionally numb, our heroine stumbles through the rest of the novel looking for electrifying love to shock her out of her numb funk. She finds it, in an unexpected place, and ends up right where she started: among the mama, baby and grandbaby Camellias of Charleston.
-- Whitney Teal
