GIRLS IN TRUCKS

Meet Sarah Walters, a Camellia Society debutante with an inherited weakness for bad ideas. Sarah's mother lectures her on etiquette, but tends to get loose after a few gins. Her sister sets new standards for high school sex, then drops out of Yale to chase love. Still, Sarah tries to follow the debutante code, despite these questionable role models. After all, this is Charleston. Manners mean everything.

But it's not easy to follow those rules, particularly in the summers when she runs into boys in pickup trucks, or, later, in her life in New York. Etiquette, it turns out, is thin armor in an urban landscape where everyone wears black and the men don't hold the door open on dates—or call the morning after. With time, Sarah begins to doubts her roots. Finally, a family tragedy brings Sarah back home, where she begins to realize the motto “Once a Camellia, always a Camellia” may be more real than she ever guessed.