d her "Camellia" sisters as they navigate their way from sheltered girls to "coming out" and into adulthood in this humorous narrative on modern day debutantes. The "Camellia" world is a priveleged one where life is less about living and more about looking pretty enough to land a rich husband; even if reality, as Sarah soon discovers, abides by no such rule. There’s her older sister for one (former Camellia), whose glamour went unmatched until she dropped out of college to marry an African refugee. And it seems no man could be worthy of her mother’s austere opinion; not that Sarah minds much while slumming it with “Island boys” the summer prior to "coming out". College in upstate New York is the real eye-opener though; a ‘faster’ world of hookups, drugs and easy betrayal which paves her way into NYC single life. After a series of abysmal relationships and more than a few desperate affairs, Sarah, with the help of her Camellia sisters, resettles in Charleston to begin anew as a wiser but no less conflicted ex-debutante.
Rather than deifying the debutante microcosm, Sarah and her Camellias see the order for what it is: one of life's 'big' things with more flash than entitlement. This in mind, nothing's held back from the edge; tactless behavior established as the norm with Sarah practically excelling at self-induced misery. Crouch's authoritarian style seems all too eager to describe Sarah's plight: sleeping with her dead friend's husband after the funeral, flying off to Peru in mail-order bride fashion, stalking her abusive ex, etc. The issues with her family only add to the farce; her mom's strange friends, her father's detachment and her sister's rebellion all revealing holes in the well-maintained veneer of Southern gentility.
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