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The Girls by Emma Cline

Literary fiction

The Girls

Debut

We love supporting debut authors. Congrats, Emma Cline, on your first book!

by Emma Cline

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Quick take

Not a cheap, voyeuristic thrill, but a lovely meditation about the helter skelter of girlhood...

Why I love it

My perfect summer read is the kind of page-turner that requires some discipline in order to savor -- read it too quickly and you might miss many lovely nuances. Emma Cline's The Girls is one of those wonderful life-interrupting novels that contains too many perfectly written sentences to read in one sitting, as tempting as it might be.

At first the premise of The Girls gave me pause. I feared that this novel about a teenage girl who joins a Manson Family-like cult in California in the summer of 1969 would be a cheap-thrills horror read, disturbing, the stuff of nightmares. And yes, some of it is macabre (when you're talking about a cult of young women who commit horrific murders for an evil hippie guru, it has to be!) But Cline keeps the violence to a minimum, and only where it's necessary. Turns out, The Girls is not a cheap, voyeuristic thrill at all, but a lovely meditation about the helter skelter of girlhood, about suburban boredom and the agonies of loneliness, of feeling like the life you're really meant to live is way off in a distant future you can barely imagine. And how thrilling it feels when that bit of life suddenly comes into focus, even if you have to squint very hard to see it.

"Maybe this was a better way, even though it seemed alien," thinks 14 year-old Evie upon experiencing the welcoming disarray of the commune for the first time. "To be part of this amorphous group, believing love could come from any direction. So you wouldn't be disappointed if not enough came from the direction you'd hoped." Even though I knew this magical time in Evie's life would end poorly (to say the least!) I couldn't help relating to Evie's longing for connection ? in whatever form it might take.

And through Evie I was able to see how a "good girl" can be drawn towards darkness, feelings anyone who has ever been a teenage girl will relate to on some level. It's these moral (and mortal) ambiguities that drew me in deep and will keep The Girls on my mind long after the summer is over.

Member ratings (3,253)

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Literary fiction
View all
Intermezzo
The Book of George
Real Americans
Dirty Diana
Wellness
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
The God of the Woods
Same As It Ever Was
Annie Bot
Bear
Mercury
True Biz
Family Happiness
The Lady Waiting
The Other Valley
Hard by a Great Forest
Good Material
The Bullet Swallower
Happy All the Time
Rental House
Alice Sadie Celine
Let Us Descend
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Shark Heart
Homeseeking
Transcendent Kingdom
Hello Beautiful
Dominicana
What's Mine and Yours
The Unsettled
Ask Again, Yes
Vladimir
Infinite Country
The Prophets
Normal People
The Verifiers
Salvage the Bones
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
I Have Some Questions for You
Black Buck
The History of Love
Age of Vice
Paper Names
The Light Pirate
The Secret History
The Kite Runner
Memorial
The Half Moon
Happiness Falls
The Gifted School
The Death of Vivek Oji
The Knockout Queen
Little Monsters
Yerba Buena
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Free Food for Millionaires
A Burning
The Mothers
The Water Dancer
Small Country
The Sympathizer
Fleishman Is in Trouble
Lot
An American Marriage
The Animators
The Mars Room
Exit West
White Fur
Woman No. 17
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Eat Only When You're Hungry
Rainbirds
A Ladder to the Sky
Golden Child
The Goldfinch
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P
& Sons
The Association of Small Bombs
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Signal Fires
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Blue Sisters