The Girls: A Novel by Emma Cline (Epub)

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Ebook Info

  • Published: 2017
  • Number of pages: 368 pages
  • Format: Epub
  • File Size: 0.80 MB
  • Authors: Emma Cline

Description

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

“Thrilling.”—Jennifer Egan

“Compelling and startling.”—The Economist

User’s Reviews

Review “Spellbinding . . . A seductive and arresting coming-of-age story hinged on Charles Manson, told in sentences at times so finely wrought they could almost be worn as jewelry . . . [Emma] Cline gorgeously maps the topography of one loneliness-ravaged adolescent heart. She gives us the fictional truth of a girl chasing danger beyond her comprehension, in a Summer of Longing and Loss.”—The New York Times Book Review “[The Girls reimagines] the American novel . . . Like Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica or Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, The Girls captures a defining friendship in its full humanity with a touch of rock-memoir, tell-it-like-it-really-was attitude.”—Vogue “Debut novels like this are rare, indeed. . . . The most remarkable quality of this novel is Cline’s ability to articulate the anxieties of adolescence in language that’s gorgeously poetic without mangling the authenticity of a teenager’s consciousness. The adult’s melancholy reflection and the girl’s swelling impetuousness are flawlessly braided together. . . . For a story that traffics in the lurid notoriety of the Manson murders, The Girls is an extraordinary act of restraint. With the maturity of a writer twice her age, Cline has written a wise novel that’s never showy: a quiet, seething confession of yearning and terror.”—The Washington Post “Outstanding . . . Cline’s novel is an astonishing work of imagination—remarkably atmospheric, preternaturally intelligent, and brutally feminist. . . . Cline painstakingly destroys the separation between art and faithful representation to create something new, wonderful, and disorienting.”—The Boston Globe “Finely intelligent, often superbly written, with flashingly brilliant sentences, . . . Cline’s first novel, The Girls, is a song of innocence and experience. . . . In another way, though, Cline’s novel is itself a complicated mixture of freshness and worldly sophistication. . . . At her frequent best, Cline sees the world exactly and generously. On every other page, it seems, there is something remarkable—an immaculate phrase, a boldly modifying adverb, a metaphor or simile that makes a sudden, electric connection between its poles. . . . Much of this has to do with Cline’s ability to look again, like a painter, and see (or sense) things better than most of us do.”—The New Yorker “Breathtaking . . . So accomplished that it’s hard to believe it’s a debut. Cline’s powerful characters linger long after the final page.”—Entertainment Weekly (Summer Must List) “A mesmerizing and sympathetic portrait of teen girls.”—People (Summer’s Best Books) “The Girls isn’t a Wikipedia novel, it’s not one of those historical novels that congratulates the present on its improvements over the past, and it doesn’t impose today’s ideas on the old days. As the smartphone-era frame around Evie’s story implies, Cline is interested in the Manson chapter for the way it amplifies the novel’s traditional concerns. Pastoral, marriage plot, crime story—the novel of the cult has it all.”—New York Magazine

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ I have mixed feelings about this book. I picked it up because of the hype (kudos to Cline’s publishing team) and the first few pages were really impressive. I don’t read a lot of literary stuff like this, and Cline’s words were mesmerizing at first. Every sentence perfectly and poetically constructed. You could take any snippet from this book, post it anywhere, and it would be obvious how strong a writer Cline is, without even knowing what the story was about.But then it became exhausting. Because while Cline is an incredibly gifted writer, she’s not a great storyteller, and it got really tiring reading paragraph after paragraph of beautiful prose that essentially says nothing. The pacing was soooooo sloooooow. It took pages to describe the smallest details. The story, in a nutshell, is about a girl who becomes part of a cult, and the cult commits heinous murders. The premise is fantastic. But in my opinion, it was told from the wrong point of view. What should have been a fabulous imaginative retelling of Manson fell flat, because the protagonist is only a bystander, and a part-time one at that. She doesn’t live with the cult – she goes home most nights. She has no memorable relationships with anyone else in the group, other than the one girl she’s infatuated with. But because her attraction is one-sided, the relationship never develops. And other than this one girl, the other characters are barely sketched out. They only exist in her peripheral vision, hazy snapshots at best, and this includes the Manson-like character himself. The victims, we don’t really know at all, so it’s difficult to be horrified about what happens to them. Speaking of which, she’s not involved at all in the planning of the murders, and she’s even not there when the murders happen. All that build-up, and we don’t even see the terrible thing that’s the climax of the story.The book is essentially one giant flashback, with a handful of present-day scenes telling us very little about the protagonist’s life now (but I get why Cline choose to do it this way – if the story is told in flashback, she can tell it with added insight and hindsight, using lots of “little did she know’s” to hint at what’s to come – a cheap way to create tension, but I suppose it’s better than no tension at all). In the end, though, it’s so completely dissatisfying because we don’t know what she’s learned, or how she’s grown. She hints at trying to help a young girl in the present-day, someone who reminds her of herself, but again, it never develops into anything.This is a story that gets lost in its own words. I’m so disappointed. Great premise, great writing, weak story.

⭐ The Girls is undoubtedly a challenging read. Based on the Manson murders, make no mistake, there is a hefty amount of uncomfortable content centering around drug use and sexual encounters (some of which I would clearly label as assault). The fact that the main protagonist Evie is a mere 14 years old, makes it one tough pill to swallow.Based on several reviews, I was anticipating a dark read full of teenage angst that played on a graphic core in order to up the “wow” factor. I could not have been more wrong. Nor have I ever been happier to be so wrong. The Girls is a shining example of how to utilize first person narration in the most successful ways.It is the end of the 60’s in Northern California. It is summer, and Evie Boyd feels isolated and out-of-place. Like many teenage girls she just wants to belong. Enter Suzanne. She is care-free and captivating. Immediately drawn to this young stranger, she slowly begins distancing herself from her family and only real friend to spend more time with Suzanne and her friends on the ranch led by the amorous Russell. Evie feels like she has finally found her place in life. But once the initial luster wears off, she realizes she may be involved in something sinister and dangerous.“My eyes were already habituated to the texture of decay, so I thought that I had passed back into the circle of light.”Evie Boyd is so bitterly realistic and raw as a protagonist that there is a part of her I found uncomfortably familiar. As a young impressionable girl desperately seeking an acceptance that most of us can remember feeling was out of reach during some point in our young lives, she is undeniably relatable to at least a small degree. It is this painfully honest approach to her character that gives her and The Girls true life and credibility. The part of me that would normally question her frighteningly bad decisions and actions was easily replaced with an equal amount of sadness and understanding. I didn’t like that I was juggling this new-found sympathy for a character who was making harrowing choices, but I couldn’t help but admire the author’s ability to solicit this from me. Full immersion into Evie’s life had occurred.“You wanted things and you couldn’t help it, because there was only your life, only yourself to wake up with, and how could you ever tell yourself what you wanted was wrong?”Cline spares zero expense or feelings in effort to establish this dark world that is a cult. She brazenly exposes the reader to the loss of Evie’s innocence, gross sexual encounters and the repetitive drug use that fuels this disturbing journey into one young girl’s psych and time on the ranch. The very facets that make The Girls so disturbing also make it so triumphant. This no holds barred approach succeeds in setting the stage and making the unfathomable feel horribly possible. It is through this bold technique that the reader can begin to process how our young protagonist has come to find herself on the ranch. This is a terrifyingly sincere representation of cult life and culture. It is not meant to be pleasant or easy.Cline’s writing is almost poetic yet pragmatic. She effortlessly supplies a fluid narration that leaps from Evie’s past to present. I have noted some reader’s struggled with the change in tone at times, but I personally found this to play perfectly into her transitions, conveying our narrator’s current state of mind more effectively. The ending did not offer an overly satisfying conclusion, but I couldn’t really ask that from The Girls.So here is the hard part, I loved this novel. But I am hesitant to recommend it. This will be too much for many and rightfully so. This is a brutal coming of age story during a very dark time. It has burrowed deep into the core of my mind and is sure to remain for some time. If you find yourself truly fascinated with cult culture and the human psych and can stomach the harsh reality of what it entails, then consider adding this to your list.

⭐ Sooooo….let me preface with, I’m a Manson aficionado. No, I’m not a murder-obsessed freak BUT I am really into old Hollywood, Sharon Tate, The Beach Boys, etc. The premise of, “based on..” is a stretch. Emma steals well-known artifacts of information from starlets and the Manson murders and simply inserts them into conversations or thoughts the main protagonist has. And that’s…fine I guess. Probably the most interesting parts of the book to be honest. Because the conversations, the details of the ranch, the backdrop of the deserts, everything is just blah. I was bored. Almost from the very beginning, but I powered through it trying to buy the hype. (Someone else said it in their review; yes, the publishing company did an amazing job of getting the word out, that’s for sure!) Look, I’m stoked that people are even still writing books, let alone reading them AND sometimes buying the actual book. However, this was just boring.

⭐ Emma Cline can write. She has a decent flair with her prose and a good sense of character development. However, she is not able to incorporate these two elements into a plot structure that is both dynamic and unifying.Some reviewers have pointed out Cline’s missteps with plot details centered around the 1969 phases of the story–e.g., stolen credits cards used at a self-service station when no such services existed. However, the larger misstep of Cline’s with her narrative has to do with not addressing the tensions that permeated the late sixties with the deep chasm between post-WWII parents who worked hard to provide their children a safe and plentiful style of life and those children who rebelled against what they perceived to be gross excess, an embarrassment of riches fueling conspicuous consumption. Vietnam was at the center of the chasm between generations, as was race relations, as was just about every value that the parents of these times believed in–dress, music, length of hair, and life goals attained through apprenticeships and education where all things that sparked debate and endless conflict between parents and their children. None of this finds its way into the novel.Also, as for the Manson connection. Very loose in this narrative. The Manson story was headline material for almost a full year. The horror of their acts resonated with so many who took their sense of security with blithe sureness, turning it into a frenzied response against the counter-culture movements. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in 1968; those tragedies shocked a nation, leaving many to feel a deep loss that signaled troubled times ahead. The Manson murders, the Zodiac murders, SLA, the Zebra murders, Jonestown, and Harvey Milk and Moscone murders all followed into the mid-70s. Manson murders marked the departure of tragedies that were aimed at our iconic leaders to ones that were aimed at plebeian and lesser stars. To incorporate some of this with the generational divide would have given flesh to this story. To do so would require characters and story-lines that would connect the established narrative, and I am sure that Cline is more than capable of such an undertaking.

⭐ I hadn’t realized until I read the reviews of the book afterwards that this was a fictionalized story of the Manson murders. I’m not sure if knowing that before reading the book would have changed my opinion one way or the other about the book – but honestly, I’m unsure why we need to fictionalize the book and change character names when the story of the Manson murders is such a part of the history of cults and cult crimes in the US.I enjoyed the book, but it isn’t the best book I’ve read of all times.As a teenager Evie is immersed in a cult. The cult leader, Russell, is followed by many young girls as he seeks to become a musician. The story is told from Evie’s perspective as both the young teenage girl in love with the idea of one of the other girls in the cult and the adult who had to deal with the guilt of becoming involved with a cult that committed a heinous crime.Because Evie was more on the outskirts of the cult as opposed to being one of the more fervent followers, I actually feel like a lot was missing and that the character allowed Emma Cline to cut corners. With Evie being only on the periphery of the cult, I was unable to truly have any understanding of why these girls remained in the cult, why they chose to follow Russell, and why some of them chose to make decisions that would alter the rest of their lives. I think had the story chosen another character to tell the story from, we could have had a lot fuller of a story.

⭐ This book exceeded my expectations.A lot of authors have covered female adolescence, but Emma Cline illuminates the experience in a harrowing and brutally honest light. The way Emma Cline writes about Evie’s obsession with Suzanne is such a true experience, and it reminded me of several relationships I personally had in my teens. Evie’s relationship with Suzanne covers a lot of ground; it is a friendship based on envy, admiration, and attraction. Ultimately, this book is about a desire to find a sense of belonging with the people that manage to dazzle you, and perhaps even become like them.Men run the world that Cline writes about. Indeed, there is a man at the center of their cult. But it is the need to belong with the girls that shapes this gorgeous narrative.

⭐ The subject of Cline’s novel, the young women of the “Manson Family” cult, is one that has mystified and intrigued thousands ever since their famous murders in 1969. This is a daunting subject for a debut novel and Cline shows herself to be a talented young author. Cline writes this fictionalized account in the first person POV, through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old teen struggling with her identity and fascinated by the close camaraderie of the Manson’s girls. She joins them for a summer. Our narrator leads us through the initial free-love, anti-establishment, hippy phase of the cult, Manson’s messiah-like command, and then to the eventual murderous events.I found myself turning page after page to understand what led up to that fateful night. First, who were these young women? At the time, they seemed so ordinary in the papers. One was even a homecoming princess. Second, why was Manson so compelling, so mesmerizing for these girls? After all, in his photos he appeared grossly unappealing and scary. And third, what turned this hippy commune into a murderous cult?Although I very much enjoyed Cline’s writing and subject, I finished the book frustrated and wanting more. I found her change of the cult members’ names annoying and never understood why that was necessary. It is possible that her re-named fictional characters represent combinations of several real-life cult members and therefore attaching just one of their names to that character would’ve been historically inaccurate, but I wished she’d found a better solution for that problem. Additionally, although I learned a lot about the cult, I never got good answers to the above three important questions that gnawed at me throughout the book. In fact, the third question– what turned changed the Manson Family mission–occurred when our narrator wasn’t there. She returns from being away, and it’s different. I felt she could’ve gone further in this novel. Nonetheless, Cline is talented and I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of her work in the future.

⭐ The rating is no indication of how much I liked this book — in fact, part of its brilliance I think, was to take me back to the raw, gnawing feelings of adolescent shame, humiliation and self-consciousness with really pristine accuracy. I’m not sure I enjoyed reading it much at all (though I could NOT put it down). Emma Cline really nails the way women are raised to look at themselves–and other women– with either cruel nasty judgement that can flip on a dime, or the kind of infatuated idolatry of the girl-crush. She taps into something so universal that when we get to the part of the actual Manson murders, we find ourselves wondering, could I have done that at 14? I have to say, I was dreading the ending every time I remembered the subject that this story is loosely based around, and I really appreciate that it was not the gratuitous nightmare-provoking mess of images that I was so sure it would be. Instead of course, it was much more deeply disturbing. As much as I found it unpleasant to read this, I highly recommend it.

⭐ Never have I used the highlight feature on my Kindle until this novel. The author’s turn of phrase is often breathtaking; I found myself going back to read a phrase many times in this book. The story however, peters out long before the ending. This is a short story stretched out to be a novel. Also, Evie’s attraction to the cult seems a little too armchair psychology to me, as well as why her experience with the cult has made her the adult she is. Re the cult, except for Suzanne and the leader, the other members are not memorable. The Manson-like incident near the end of the novel is done very tastefully,is not graphic, yet effectively captures the psychological horror of what the victims were going through. This writer has potential; I will definitely look forward to her sophomore effort.

⭐ An astounding accomplishment for a first-time novelist, “The Girls” is a truly mesmerizing read about a Manson-like cult in 1969 as told from the perspective of a sweet suburban girl swept up into the group’s blinding light of passion and madness. The tale of lonely 14-year-old Evie Boyd starts out innocently enough when she watches three girls traipse through her local park, looking like nothing she has ever seen before. Once she catches the eye of an older girl named Suzanne, her world turns on its axis and careens out of control. Nothing will ever be the same again. The year is 1969, and the titular girls are the ones who hang out at “The Ranch” with a charismatic man named Russell, a larger-than-life personality who mirrors that of Charles Manson. You get what’s about to come (who doesn’t remember the brutal Tate-Labianca murders?) but the journey is one of nail-biting suspense that includes some of the best writing I have ever read. I literally stopped myself over a dozen times to re-read a paragraph over and over again, marveling at Emma Cline’s prose. Brava, Emma! I will be thinking of little Evie Boyd’s summer of ’69 for a long, long time to come.

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