Michelle Thomas's Page

"Meet Sarah Walters, a Charleston debutante with questionable manners and an inherited weakness for bad ideas. Sarah's brilliant older sister just dropped out of Yale to run off with an unstable graduate student from Africa. Her beautiful mother lectures her incessantly on the importance of good etiquette but tends to act cold and mysterious after she's had her nightly gin. Still, Sarah tries to follow the rules set by the Camellia Society, the creators of the debutante code. After all, this is Charleston. Decorum means everything. But it's not easy to be good, particularly in those summers when she and her friend run into wild Island boys in pickup trucks. When Sarah heads north to college and New York, she finds a world very different from the one promised to her by the Camellias."

This book had so much promise. It was well written and very easy to read and really pulled me in from the first page. It seemed to be leading up to a massive finale which never really came in the end. Sarah is a likeable character who is perfectly flawed in many ways and yet towards the end of the book I was actually getting tired of hearing about "poor Sarah" and her terrible luck.

The ending disappointed me. I was hoping for a great finish to an enjoyable light-hearted read, however, it appears our main character decides to settle and accept her terrible luck. An enjoyable read but it is let down by the ending.