THE INSTANT BESTSELLER • An indelible portrait of girls, the women they become, and that moment in life when everything can go horribly wrong
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, Esquire, Newsweek, Vogue, Glamour, People, The Huffington Post, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Time Out, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, Slate
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 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.
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award • Shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize • The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Emma Cline—One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists
Praise for The Girls
“Spellbinding . . . a seductive and arresting coming-of-age story.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Extraordinary . . . Debut novels like this are rare, indeed.”—The Washington Post
“Hypnotic.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Gorgeous.”—Los Angeles Times
“Savage.”—The Guardian
“Astonishing.”—The Boston Globe
“Superbly written.”—James Wood, The New Yorker
“Intensely consuming.”—Richard Ford
“A spectacular achievement.”—Lucy Atkins, The Times
Emma Cline's The Girls has been widely billed as a novel about the Manson cult, but that's not entirely accurate. It does feature a significant portion of plot about a Manson-esque group, but what it's really about, more than anything else, is the heady experience of being a 14 year-old girl. We first meet Evie Boyd as an older woman, staying briefly in a friend's beach house when she finds herself between gigs as a live-in nurse. Her friend's college-age son stops by with his teenage girlfriend, and watching them and her brings back Evie's memories of that fateful summer when she found herself around the edges of the lives of Russell (our Manson stand-in) and his pack of girls.
Evie's in an especially vulnerable spot that summer; her father has recently left her mother for a young colleague, and Evie and her longtime best friend are starting to drift apart. She's fascinated by the group of teenage hippies she sees around town, drawn to their exotic-seeming poverty so different from her own comfortable trust-funded existence (she's the granddaughter of a never-named wealthy former child star clearly modeled on Shirley Temple). Evie's particularly hypnotized by their ringleader, Suzanne, and the intensity of her infatuation finds her constantly lying and making excuses to go out to the ranch where the group lives, doing whatever she can (sex, drugs, helping the girls break into homes in her own neighborhood) to fit in and attract Suzanne's attention and praise. But eventually, as in real life, there's a grisly murder and the hazy fever dream of that summer ends, leaving Evie back in her old world.
Cline has a real gift for atmospheric, lush prose. She creates a powerful sense of mood, a feeling that every moment is weighed with portent...which goes right along with what I remember from being that age. Everything is so close to the surface, and Cline really captures those feelings of uncertainty and being right on the edge of something meaningful that characterize being that age. She also draws a picture-perfect portrait of the kind of all-consumingness of female friendships in the teenage years. It's a tricky thing to depict without devolving into cliche, but Cline really gets at the heart of that desperation to please the object of your obsession. The plot moves along fairly slowly, but the careful attention paid to creating the ambiance of teenage girlness and the rich, vivid writing more than make up for it. I don't know that this is a book that would be as successful if you've never actually been a young teenage girl and can't identify with it, but I personally really enjoyed it and would recommend it highly.
