355 pages
English language
Published Oct. 28, 2016
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 …
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.
I'm currently reading Cline's The Guest and really enjoying it, so I thought I'd try this one on audio. I was surprised to find myself incredibly uninterested. I guess Cline will be hit or miss for me!
I'll admit it, I started this book over a year ago and didn't finish. Picked it up again a few months ago and didn't finish. Finally, after finishing my other book early in the day, I just needed something to hold me over and checked it out again.
At the point where I stopped reading, I found this to be a tiresome read. It felt like it was moving a bit too slowly and I initially found the writing style a bit disjointed with the author often referring to things that hadn't happened, kind of spoiling aspects of the story.
In picking it up again, I started to enjoy it more. I found the story and narration to be really unique and captivating, in the way that a car crash is captivating. Knowing how the story unfolds before you get to That Moment in the book was anxiety inducing but …
I'll admit it, I started this book over a year ago and didn't finish. Picked it up again a few months ago and didn't finish. Finally, after finishing my other book early in the day, I just needed something to hold me over and checked it out again.
At the point where I stopped reading, I found this to be a tiresome read. It felt like it was moving a bit too slowly and I initially found the writing style a bit disjointed with the author often referring to things that hadn't happened, kind of spoiling aspects of the story.
In picking it up again, I started to enjoy it more. I found the story and narration to be really unique and captivating, in the way that a car crash is captivating. Knowing how the story unfolds before you get to That Moment in the book was anxiety inducing but also thrilling. The main character was really expertly written with her nuance and complex personality. I'm really glad I picked this up again.
I really liked the prose in this book, and I liked how Evie came out of her shell. The main reason why this book gets just 3 stars however, is the fact that not a lot happened in the book. I thought the book was going to be way more haunting than it was.
3 1/2 stars
This was a pretty good read. I liked the story of lonely Evie and her crush on an older mysterious girl. I did not especially care for the commune being patterned after the Manson family. That part seemed sort of like cheating, like a lack of imagination somehow. The same kind of story could have been told without the Manson family parallels. I'm not sure why that part bugged me.
Anyway the writing is very good so it is worth a read.
Meh. I'll admit that cults fascinate me. So in theory, I should've enjoyed this book. Maybe I would have - had the author focused more on character development. Instead, this book felt a bit one-dimensional. I wanted more back-story on each of the characters - especially because the protagonist (who is pretty much the only person we DID get to know in any depth) was hard to like. I think the author has skill - but may have been overly ambitious in the ground she wanted to cover - and as a result, skipped across a lot of it superficially. Had I been her editor, I would've suggested she narrow her focus and go deeper.
This is a powerful & disturbing look at a girl who becomes part of a thinly-veiled Manson Family analogue. Not for the faint of heart.
http://fedpeaches.blogspot.com/2016/08/things-went-down-we-dont-understand.html
This is not my kind of book.
I don’t like fiction in which brutal crimes are important—real life has enough cruelty. I also don’t need or want to learn about the inner life of an adolescent girl in 1969. Finally, while I have nothing against the West Coast, I’ve never lived there so sometimes fiction based in California makes me feel I’m not getting it, like a book about skydiving might.
I picked up Emma Cline’s[a:Emma Cline|2926065|Emma Cline|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1448177198p2/2926065.jpg] The Girls from the advanced copy shelf at the book store I work in, read the first few pages, and put the book in a locker so I’d be sure no one else would take it.
Cline is one of those magical writers with a gift for phrasing that most poets would envy. Like Karen Russell, but different. Every page has at least one sentence that makes you shake your head in …
This is not my kind of book.
I don’t like fiction in which brutal crimes are important—real life has enough cruelty. I also don’t need or want to learn about the inner life of an adolescent girl in 1969. Finally, while I have nothing against the West Coast, I’ve never lived there so sometimes fiction based in California makes me feel I’m not getting it, like a book about skydiving might.
I picked up Emma Cline’s[a:Emma Cline|2926065|Emma Cline|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1448177198p2/2926065.jpg] The Girls from the advanced copy shelf at the book store I work in, read the first few pages, and put the book in a locker so I’d be sure no one else would take it.
Cline is one of those magical writers with a gift for phrasing that most poets would envy. Like Karen Russell, but different. Every page has at least one sentence that makes you shake your head in wonder, as if you’ve seen a magician perform an impossible trick. You want to copy her words and steal them, but you don’t because you know they wouldn’t go well with your writing.
The story is of Evie Boyd who at age fourteen sees a trio of older girls in a park who have the confidence and presence that Evie lacks, yet craves. These girls, with their thrift store clothes and jewelry, uncombed hair and loud laughter, move through the crowd as “Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water,” and soon Evie is in their group on a ranch within bicycling distance from her suburban house, where the girls and others are adjuncts to Russell, a Charles Manson-like figure, an aspiring musician with little talent.
The novel shifts from 1969 to the present when Evie, now middle age and narrating, unexpectedly shares a house for a few days with a teenage couple who know that her past included being in a small cult that murdered four people, a la Sharon Tate and others, a crime Evie was not a part of. The story doesn’t focus on the crime, though it remains the heart of it. The main relationship is Evie and Suzanne, the object of Evie’s schoolgirl crush.
Evie and the others seek to find meaning and love in life denied to girls in 1969 and now.
Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get. The treacled pop songs, the dresses described in the catalogs with words like “sunset” and “Paris.” Then the dreams are taken away with such violent force; the hand wrenching the buttons of the jeans, nobody looking at the man shouting at his girlfriend on the bus.
THE GIRLS by Emma Cline (Random House). Here’s the debut novel that the publishing world can’t stop talking about. It’s a coming-of-age story, set in Northern California in the late 1960s, that involves a thoughtful teenage girl who drifts into a Charles Manson-like cult. This promises to be a perceptive page-turner, a volume to haunt summer’s warm nights.
