The Girls

I couldn't have loved this more in the end. I found the initial chapters beautifully put together but just a touch too mannered, but then, once Evie comes into contact with the ranch, the book comes absolutely alive. It moves at this sinister, unstoppable lope and there is no description, word, or character that is spare to its purposes. Despite what reviewers and other readers say, for me it ends at precisely the right place. It's been ages since I read something I so wholeheartedly admired - I can't recommend it highly enough.

This one was wicked fun, an ice cream on a hot day kind of book. Cline takes a good look at what it's like being a teenage girl—not even a particularly alienated or hurt one, but the general alienation and hurt involved in being 14—and spins a story based loosely on the Manson family murders around it. Aside from the fact that it's well written and just deliciously readable, there's an unpreachy feminist subtext that gives it some heft. If this is the book of the summer, it's a good one.

In the summer of '69, a teenage girl, Evie, becomes caught up with a cult based on the Manson family.

But it is a mistake to think this is a novel about Charles Manson. The title says exactly what this novel is about: the girls (and women) and the trap that our society sets for them, the trap of defining our self-worth and identity solely through the presence of a man. All of the female characters in this novel have fallen into this trap: Evie herself, her mother, her father's girlfriend, her friend Connie, the teenage girl she meets as an older woman, and especially the girls living with Russell (the Manson character). And the men themselves, concerned only with themselves and their own desires, are universally unworthy of this female show more subjugation. Well, not all men. There is, briefly, Tom, who is able to see the commune with clear eyes and tell the truth about it, but Evie wills herself to blindness nevertheless.

When that trap is taken to extremes, when the girls relinquish their sense of self so completely that they will do anything their man tells them to, it inevitably ends in violence, but who are the victims? Other women, primarily, and young boys--not just the one who is murdered, but also the boy living at the commune. This is a modern American fable.

But Evie herself is not in thrall to Russell as these other girls are. The person who captivates her is Suzanne. When she first sees Suzanne, Evie thinks she is completely free, that she does not care what anyone else thinks about her. Of course, we later see that this is very much a false impression, but this is what attracts Evie to Suzanne in the first place. And we wonder, as we see Evie in her middle-aged incarnation, lonely and alone, if she had just managed to break herself free from the trap and find herself a Suzanne who had also gotten free, might she have found happiness? show less

The Girls is Emma Cline's first novel, and yet there is nothing about the novel to suggest this fact. The entire story exemplifies mature writing. Ms. Cline never beats readers over the head with her themes, her messages, or anything else. Hers is a nuanced story that creates a similar obsession to Evie's within readers. She also makes the story about more than the cult, for the emotions and experiences Evie has are ones with which most female readers will be familiar. Evie's story is as much a coming-of-age story as it is an awakening of female awareness and the role society has created for females.

Note that The Girls is an emotional book. We see Evie as a young girl, in the first stages of teenage rebellion, searching for a new show more identity and craving excitement in a way only teenagers can. We also see Evie as an adult, coming to gripes with her past. Both versions of Evie are raw and desperate; young Evie is desperate for love, while older Evie is desperate for peace. Both are supremely angry, and both leave a significant impression on a reader. In addition, these are not superficial emotions. These are raw, visceral, and barely-contained emotions that can make reading the novel difficult at times because of their intensity.

The emotions are not the only things that are intense. Cult life is consuming; Evie's relationship with Suzanne is equally so. The duties of the girls on the ranch are disturbing, and it becomes way too clear at just how easy it is to manipulate the right type of person with something as simple as attention, ritual, and rhetoric. Ms. Cline uses this depressing backdrop of abject poverty and hero worship to frame Evie's past and present, define friendship, and derive some unsettling truths about responsibility of one's actions.

The Girls is not an easy book to read, and yet the conclusions to which Ms. Cline leads readers are vital. While the action takes place on the ranch and surrounding this cult, the story has universal appeal in regards to its messaging. In fact, the lessons about identity, belonging, cause and effect, and the lasting impact of one intimate relationship are profound and downright chilling. The Girls not only lives up to the hype, it surpasses it and really is one of the must-read books of the year. show less

I have to post a review in solidarity with the one other person thus far who just didn't get the wonders of this book; I've heard glowing things about it, so I was excited to get my hands on a galley today. I kept reading and reading, waiting to get to the part where it became riveting and amazing, but it was just creepy and icky. I didn't like any of the characters, including (and perhaps especially) the narrator; I didn't feel that I got to know any of them or that they ever developed from whatever they initially were. I certainly wouldn't have had any interest in hanging out with them; they seemed shallow and boring and obsessed with sex and drugs in a way that didn't resonate with me at all. It wasn't even suspenseful, just dark and show more depressing. I get that some people (including some whose reading taste I normally greatly respect) find it a fabulous psychological thriller, but to those who find it utterly UN-thrilling and are simply confused by the over-the-top reviews of it: Know that you are not alone. show less

For any generation, there are political and cultural markers that define and shape it and that remain forever engraved in their collective memories: for the baby boomers, it’s the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War,…and the Manson murders. The murders perhaps more than anything put an end to the idealized view of the hippie movement by revealing its dangerous underbelly and upended the philosophy of ‘peace, love, and understanding’ that had propelled the 1967 summer of love and signalled that it was truly and completely over.

So when reading The Girls by author Emma Cline, it was impossible for an old boomer like me not to feel…not nostalgia certainly but more perhaps a visceral memory of show more the fear that the event inspired. Certainly this is not the first novel to create a fictional account based on the events surrounding the murders that I have read but it was one of the first that took me back so strongly to that summer of ’69 and that says a lot about the book especially as Cline avoids stressing the extreme violence as a means to engender an emotional response. This is more about the psychology behind cults that allows this kind of violence to occur than about the event itself.

The narrator, Evie, now middle-aged, is looking back at the year 1969. Her parents are divorced and are moving on with their lives and her best friend has rejected her, leaving her lonely and rebellious. It is then when she spots the women in the park, seeming to move with a kind of confidence and joy that Evie wishes she could emulate. When she finally meets them and is invited to join their ‘family’, she is more fascinated by Suzanne, one of the girls in the cult, than by Russell, the Manson-like leader who is, interestingly, hardly present in the story except as an idealized symbol of power to his followers, an ideal that is completely negated when he actually is present. This is a tale more about the women who are seduced by the idea of a powerful man, women who seek validation and strength from this man who, in reality, in no way resembles the ideal. He is at best a catalyst -the women act on his orders while he remains hidden in the shadows. Rather than giving them strength, he drains them of theirs. But even then, when the cult is finally uncovered, Russell hides while the girls still try to protect him:

Even at the end, the girls had been stronger than Russell.

The Girls is not an easy read. It is a fascinating psychological thriller but it is also an unapologetic feminist novel. Cline has created a powerful narrative about identity and friendship and the trap too many young women fall into of allowing others to define their value. As such, it is almost unrelentingly dark and pessimistic about the role of women in society, not only in the past but in the present where Evie is confronted with the reality of how little has changed as she watches another young woman lose her self-worth to a man who considers her as little more than a useful prop in his life. And yet Cline manages to deliver her message without beating the reader over the head with it, a feat somewhat like walking a high wire without a net and she does it without a misstep. The Girls has been receiving a lot of hype and I have to say this is the rare book that deserves it. That this is Cline’s debut novel makes it even more impressive.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review show less

Could not put this book down! Never have I read someone who could put into words the consistent awkwardness of being a 14-year-old girl. Everything she wrote caused me to flashback to my own teen days with equal parts nostalgia and nausea. The author also successfully captured the darkness of the era and the brainwashing that "the girls" endured that lead to the awful crime. I highly recommend this book!