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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 browse the headline in the Paducah, Kentucky, paper.

Thirty-five years later, four of these "girls" reunite to cruise the river again. This time around it's on the luxury steamboat, The Belle of Natchez, and there's no publicity. This time around, when they reach New Orleans, they'll supply the river the ashes of any fifth rafter-beautiful Margaret ("Baby") Ballou.

Revered on her behalf powerful female characters, here Lee Smith tells a brilliantly authoritative story of how college pals who was raised within an era when these were still called "girls" have negotiated life as "women." Harriet Holding is a hesitant teacher who has never married (she can't explain why, even to herself). Courtney Gray struggles to step from her Southern Living-style life. Catherine Wilson, a sculptor, is suffocating in her happy third marriage. Anna Todd is a world-famous romance novelist escaping her own tragedies through her fiction. And lastly there may be Baby, the girl they come to bury-along using their memories of her rebellions and betrayals.

THE PAST GIRLS is wonderful reading. It's also wonderfully revealing of women's lives-of the idea of romance, of the relevance of past to present, of memory and desire.