Book Review: The Girls by Emma Cline

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“We all want to be seen.”

📚

It’s 1969, and young Evie Boyd finds herself at the start of another North California summer, the last before everything changes and she’s shipped off to boarding school. Bored and isolated, Evie is entranced by some girls she sees at the local park. Drawn in by their carefree attitude and lack of inhibition, she soon joins their circle, becomes inseparable from older, enthralling Suzanne, and is ingratiated into a strange and captivating cult overseen by a mesmerizing leader.

The group occupies a sprawling, dilapidated ranch deep in the hills, living a squalid, self-governed existence — fascinating, appealing, and exciting to Evie, who longs for love, acceptance, and belonging. And as she spends more time with her new friends and less at home, Evie begins to change both inside and out, inching ever closer to a dangerous precipice from which there will be no return.

Interspersing that fateful summer with Evie’s contemporary experience, The Girls oozes tension and dread, the story’s pivotal and violent climax casting a pall over the entire storyline. It’s a compelling and page-turning coming-of-age tale surrounding lust, passion, infatuation, and obsession; sex, drugs, cruelty, and misogyny; and neglect, lies, manipulation, and abuse; all set against a powerful backdrop of familial strife, individual struggle, toxic bonds, traumatic violence, and teen angst and longing.

It’s an entrancing account filled with gorgeous prose that conveys complex emotions, horrifying experiences, and intense struggles with impactful beauty and devastating clarity. In the process, the reader comes to know, empathize with, and root for a vulnerable adolescent whose only female role model is her neglectful mother, a divorcée so desperate to secure a husband that she prioritizes fledgling relationships with strangers above the health, wellbeing, and needs of her daughter. It’s a sad and depressing situation that makes Evie all the more endearing, presenting an entirely plausible reality where a single moment can mean the difference between salvation and ruin. It’s a brutal, beautiful, haunting, and unforgettable novel that makes this reader eager for more Emma Cline.

❤Amanda

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