Ocean State Libraries

On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls-classmates at a picturesque Blue Ridge women's college-launched their homemade raft (inspired by Huck Finn's) on a trip down the Mississippi. It's Girls A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi read the headline in the Paducah, Kentucky, paper. Thirty-five years later, four of those "girls" reunite to cruise the river again. This time it's on the luxury steamboat, The Belle of Natchez, and there's no publicity....

Portrays the lives of eight women graduated from the same class at Vassar.

"Introduction and notes by Brooke Allen. A fiercely satiric portrait of small-town America, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street created a sensation when it first appeared in 1920. 'If it was not the most important revelation of American life ever made,' wrote Lewis's biographer Mark Shorer, 'it was the most infamous libel upon it.' The story's heroine is Carol Kennicott, a naive college graduate who leaves St. Paul, Minnestoa, to marry a country doctor...

"Goodbye, Columbus meets the novels of Amy Tan in this American story of class, society and identity that marks the debut of a new voice in fiction"--Provided by the publisher.

This debut novel tells the story of a WASPy, old-Boston family coming face to face with an America much larger than the one it was born in. Caroline Dunlap has written off the insular world of the Boston deb parties, golf club luaus, and WASP weddings that she grew up with. But when she reluctantly returns home after her college graduation, she finds that not everything is quite as predictable, or protected, as she had imagined. Her father, the eccentric,...

"Mia Holland isn't usually one for a fling, but after a sweet, filthy night with charming Frenchman Ansel Guillaume, she makes the wildest decision of her life. Terrified of the boring but practical path ahead of her, Mia rolls the dice and follows Ansel to France for the summer to just ... play. Playing house, playing lovers ... Mia's whole life feels like pretend until she dresses up and pulls Ansel into a provocative masquerade that finally feels...

"When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper; gift wrapper; laziest ever part-time clerk at the Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. ... Convinced that Stevenson's book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its core values: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. Accompanied by her mother, her sister,...

"Kate, Aubrey, and Jenny. They first met as college roommates and soon became inseparable, even though they are as different as three women can be. Twenty years later, one of them is standing at the edge of a bridge, and someone else is urging them to jump. How did things come to this? As the novel cuts back and forth between their college years and their adult years, you see the exact reasons why these women love and hate each other--but can feelings...

Nan, an obstretic nurse; Anastasia, a businesswoman; Jean, a former social worker; and Virginia, a community college professor, all friends from college, find their interlocking relationships strained when one of them, in her late thirties, decides to have a second trimester abortion after delaying the decision in hopes that her husband will change his mind. These women have all wrestled with--and are still engaged by--the questions of careers vs....

Sophie's To-Do List: Find an apartment, find a new job (preferably not at a glossy, girly magazine), check out that open mic night in Brooklyn, and (last but definitely not least) figure out what to do about that cute rapper named Furious. . . After graduating from the University of Michigan, Sophie knows that she wants to move to New York and become a music journalist. After finally landing a job at BeatMaker magazine, finding the perfect little...