The Girls by Emma Cline Review

Title: The Girls

Author: Emma Cline

Genre: Historical Fiction

Blurb: 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, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go horribly wrong.

Me: One distinctive change from this summer has been that I've started to actively read more adult contemporary fiction, a genre that I mostly avoided unless books were critically acclaimed. It's been really nice, keeping me reading not just for education but for fun, and has also shown me some general flaws of popular "literary" or adult fiction. The Girls was one of those, where I found myself extremely interested in the story yet not entirely compelled by the writing, not intoxicated by the world of the book. 

The Ups: The premise is obviously infamous: based on the Manson cult and murders. I actually hadn't heard of them before, but I realized it was pretty evident that the whole incident has become immortalized in the collective American conscious. So although I haven't read any of the other works based on the Manson cult (which apparently focused on Manson himself rather than the girls that followed him), I really appreciated that Cline chose the girls as the crux of her story. It was fascinating to see her characterization of girlhood as almost a direct correlation to this false sense of family and purpose in a cult, where a childhood that constantly deprives you of any self-love or acceptance makes you crave the love and acceptance of others in any way possible. 

Something I was grateful for was that Cline didn't seem to fetishize the girlhood of the characters. Often times these ethereal, strange girls are described as a myth, romanticized in their insanity (The Virgin Suicides, etc.). Cline was able to describe the bond and emotional desperation of these girls without making them seem like objects only valuable for their beauty and madness. Instead, the violence and sinister quality of this social conditioning was really well-explored, making the murders seem not entirely illogical and fanatical. I could see how these girls would have logically understood this as okay, and that was more terrifying and impactful than any fetishization.

I enjoyed the plot quite a bit as well. I read the entire book quite quickly, wanting to see how it would develop. My absolute favorite part though was probably the very end. It was largely unrelated to the actual story, but Cline did such a fantastic job of capturing the often irrational and fantastic fear that women have to bear against men, especially strangers. She put into words the fleeting terror that all of us have felt at one point, often for no specific reason, that keeps us scared and keeps us girls. It made me infuriated but also I felt like it was the most honest portrayal of the fear of walking alone, walking at night, or any "dangerous" situation for women. 

The Downs: I don't know if I felt like Evie's current story was as compelling as her past one. She tells her own story from the perspective of her as a grown-up, interacting with another teenage girl and her abusive boyfriend. Those bits set in the present weren't as interesting to me, though I understood their role in the story. 

I also found that the writing often felt a little loose. Some similes and metaphors didn't quite sit right, and I think more could have been done to highlight just the intoxicating nature of this atmosphere. I wish I could have felt the desperation and heightened emotion in the language, but I think I didn't feel it as much as was told it. The strangeness of the plot and situation were enough to keep me reading, but I wondered how much stronger of an effect the book might have had if the writing had better reflected the sensations it described. 

Rating: 3 kisses!