The Last Girls centers around four middle-aged Southern women who, as students at an idyllic Blue Ridge women's college thirty years before, were inspired by Huckleberry Finn to take their own raft trip down the Mississippi River. Now a tragedy brings them back together for a repeat voyage under very different circumstances—aboard a luxurious cruise steamboat. Through this framework, which can be seen as a modern-day rendition of Mary McCarthy's The Group, Smith explores the nature of romance, the relationship between life and fiction, the relevance of the past to the present, and the unexpected course of women's lives.