Book Review / The Girls by Emma Cline
Title: The Girls
Author: Emma Cline
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 355
Summary: "Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of the 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 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."
-- Taken from the inside flap of the book
I DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO TALK ABOUT THIS BOOK. It was so incredible. Oh my god. It's one of those books that you finish and all of a sudden it becomes this sacred thing that needs its own shelf. I can barely put into words why I loved this book so much. Whenever I look back on it, I just get this strange, nostalgic feeling. It was a brutal story, nothing romantic about it, but I've completely romanticized the entire experience of it, and wowowowow I'm on another planet when I think about it.
OK SO. I don't want to make this a spoiler-y review, because I barely knew what to expect going into this story, and I think that lent to the cosmic experience I had with it. I thought it was going to be some kind of a creepy, "Manson-family" re-telling, but that was just the vehicle through which the real story travelled. This book is basically about a young girl realizing/coming to terms with the realities of being female. IT IS SO REAL I CAN BARELY THINK ABOUT IT WITHOUT MY MIND EXPLODING.
There's nothing more I want to say, because I'll just butcher any attempt at explaining why this story was so wonderful. It just touched a very visceral part of my soul, and wow that sounds lame AF, but it's true so don't judge. This book is haunting, enlightening, and just so fucked up and so good. YOU SHOULD READ THIS.
