Girls—their vulnerability, strength, and passion to belong—are at the heart of this stunning first novel for readers of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by … park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence.
Emma Cline’s remarkable debut novel is gorgeously written and spellbinding, with razor-sharp precision and startling psychological insight. The Girls is a brilliant work of fiction.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Fine, Buzz, you’ve worn me down. I’ll read The Girls.
The Girls is a standalone literary/historical fiction novel written by Emma Cline. This is her debut and it is incredible. This book…I got it and it got me. The writing, the absolute spot on way she shows how it feels to be an adolescent girl – the exhausting intensity of it all, the incessant need for validation and to belong, the 1960’s and it’s reputation for extremes. It’s so well-done.
This dark coming-of-age story is told in the past/present perspective of main character: Evie Boyd. She is a middle-aged woman reflecting on her fourteen-year-old self and the people and events of that time that she allowed to shape her. In an author interview I found online, Ms. Cline discusses her inspiration for Evie’s character.
“I remember reading a post on one of these Manson blogs by someone who had been peripherally involved with the group. And I thought, why is this person actively making this a part of their identity, even these many decades later? What do they get by identifying with this long-ago crime? I started imagining a woman whose perception of herself is based on being a bystander to history, and what that person’s life might look like.”
As the title suggests, this book is more about the girls than anything else, but the culture, characters, and events reminiscent of the notorious Charles Manson provide the backdrop and tone for this story. The Girls is haunting, disturbingly sexual, and just as complicated as adolescence itself. I recommend it.
I wasn’t sure what to expect with this book because I don’t know much about the Manson murders. I think my ignorance saved the story – I wasn’t looking for parallels, or at least, I didn’t know what I was seeing when I found them. Cline’s writing is really stunning (she uses the verb “swanning” to describe the mother moving through the June heat), and her characters were gritty and compelling. The book was much darker than I would normally pick up and enjoy, but overall, I thought it was a fascinating way of talking about the cult culture of the 60s and 70s.
I’ve seen mixed reviews, but I rather enjoyed this. It took me a little bit to get into it, but once I did, I thought the story was intriguing and it held my interest.
Ug, I feel like The Girls is the Hamilton of books. Yea, I get it, it’s amazing but we don’t have to talk about it all the time!
(this statement is unrelated to any recent Buzzers, I just had like three people on the street tell me to read it.)
The Girls pulled me in like a fever dream. Not only could I not quit reading, I couldn’t quit thinking about the main character after I’d finished the novel.
Another Manson type tale. Girls in a cult and you know how it’s going to end. However, I had trouble with Cline’s writing style. I don’t mind description, but this book could probably have been 50-75 pages less and still achieved the same goals. I won’t read it again. 3/5.
“Why Are Female Friendships Written So Hot and Bothered While Male Friendships = Bromance?”
Keziah Weir discusses The Girls by Emma Cline and Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman.
http://www.elle.com/culture/books/news/a36943/the-girls-emma-cline-girls-on-fire-robin-wasserman/
I wanted so much more of this book to read!! Emma Cline has done a wonderful job of really making you feel how Evie felt during this summer. I mean who has never felt at one point in their life such an overwhelming need to be accepted and wanted as is, almost regardless of the circumstances? Outstanding book by Emma Cline and I look forward to more books from her!
I liked it. I started reading it knowing it was a thinly veiled version of the Sharon Tate murder and Charles Manson. I was 15 years old in 1969 when it happened. I too, had run away from home that Summer, hitchhiking, trying to get to Woodstock.
I’d been warned that the novel was “prosy” but I could relate to the 14 year old Evie as I felt the same way at that time. I could have easily been taken in. All I wanted to do is runway to Haight Ashbury. Runway anywhere. So the book had a special meaning for me that if you never felt that way, it may not translate well for you. But, as unsettling as it was, I liked it and I’m recommending it. 4 stars.
A young girl’s desperate search for acceptance and the moment her life can go horribly wrong.
“—but the familiarity of the Day was disturbed by the oath the girls cut across regular world. Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water”
This book is disturbing. Take a teenager in the 60s with all the “angst” and trauma from a contentious divorce; add angry and lonely parents, and the loose, angry, flowing morality of California in that decade. Evie Boyd is attracted to a group of women clustered around a charismatic leader and splits her summer between her mother’s home- and new partner and Russell’s “ranch”. Neither is the best place for her to be, but both effect her.
Told from older Evie’s point of view, Emma Cline pulls out all the stops:the good, the bad, the horror and the attraction of “different” that will inform the reader and pull them into a believable tale much as an observer to a train wreck. Triggers of sex and drugs. I simply could not stop reading this.
A fictional take on the Manson murders from the point of view of a teenage girl who joins the group looking to escape her mother’s smothering ways.
A Manson Family novel. Written in the first person pov, the author uses inner dialog to reveal the insecurity, anger, and desperate need for approval in the protagonist character of Evie. The need to be “seen” is what propels her into a relationship with Suzanne, an angry narcissistic psychopath who has targeted her and brings her into Russell’s cult – one that replicates the Manson Family.
“No one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really, so she had become my definition. Her gaze softening my center so easily that even photographs of her seemed aimed at me, ignited with private meaning.”
Years ago, I met a charismatic yoga instructor in Hollywood. He had an entourage of women who hung around and serviced him, sexually and otherwise with money, services, and connections– a cult of sorts. In 2012 I read the biography of Charles Manson by Jeff Guinn. I saw in Manson’s girls a glaring similarity to the women I met at the yoga studio. Essentially, they have a desire for belongingness. The inexorable bond between the victimizer and his victims is what inspired me to write a novel about my experience with the manipulative and mesmerizing yoga teacher. Even when the abuse is insufferable there remains the desperate need to earn their approval and maintain a favorable position in their realm. I wonder if the author, Emma Cline, had a similar experience in knowing a character like Manson. I like the twist to this story showing Evie was compelled by Suzanne and that sense of connection and belonging was filled by Suzanne, not Manson.
“I wanted to be near Suzanne, so I believed the things that allowed me to stay there. I told myself there were things I didn’t understand.”
We don’t learn anything about Russell and very little about Suzanne—not their backstory or even what is currently propelling them. That can be the downside of first person pov unless dialog and actions show us who these characters are and what drives them. I would have liked a more deeply drawn character development of Evie and her relationship with Suzanne. It was all too shimmery like her hair…
The author does a good job showing the thoughts and emotions that roll through a young teens head as she searches for her own identity during the turbulent 60’s.
I like that his book was a coming of age story and I like the perspective from within the Manson camp, but overall this book just didn’t do anything for me. I think knowing that it was based on time spent in the Manson cult I expected more jaw dropping moments or drama or something. I get that’s it’s called “the girls” so I knew it would be much more about them and the main characters relationship with them….but for all the hype it was only mediocre in my opinion.