The Last Girls by Lee Smith

Thirty years ago, the girls in an American literature seminar at an idyllic Blue Ridge campus made their own trip down the Mississippi River on a raft, inspired by Huckleberry Finn. Now a tragedy brings them back together for a repeat voyage under very different circumstances on the luxurious steamboat Belle of Natchez. Somebody takes a trip is the oldest plot of all, these English majors learned in college, but the archetypal heroic journey has proved a woefully inadequate plot for tracing these women's life stories, now caught in the painful decisions and realizations of middle age. -- from the author's website

This is the book that my book group, The Book Bags, (don'tcha love that name?) is reading for the month of January. The book goes between present time, when the women are traveling down the river as a favor to the husband of one college friends, and the time when they were in college. Knowing what they went thru in college helps to understand the why and where of their present life.

I am sure that this book will lead to a lot of discussion about the different characters and what they have gone thru in the lives to get to this point, some good and some bad.

Authors website - http://www.leesmith.com/