Review : The Girls by Emma Cline
The Girls by Emma Cline
Pages : 355
Genre : Fiction
Stand alone
My Rating : 3.5/5
About the Book :
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.
My Thoughts :
When it came out last summer, The Girls was everywhere, and I knew as soon as I heard of it that I wanted to read it. My knowledge of the Manson murders (its inspiration) is average, I’d say, but I knew just enough to be interested in Emma Cline’s novel and to draw parallels with the real life events.
I’m sort of on the fence about how I feel about the book, to be honest. Emma Cline’s writing is good, mostly, if you can ignore the abundance of adjectives, metaphors and other overly descriptive devices – which was hard to do at times. There’s a spot, early in the book, where she describes a room as “smelling like a tent that had been folded wet” (or something similar), which immediately took me out of the story. I haven’t done much camping in my life and I have no idea what a tent folded when wet smells like! It’s one instance among many, and while some of theses figures evoked very strong images, I often felt that her writing was getting in the way of her story.
I loved the pace of the novel. The Girls is more of a coming-of-age story than a gruesome retelling of the Mason events. It’s very slow and atmospheric, psychological in tone, often uncomfortable yet impossible to put down. Definitely my kind of reading!
The story alternates between past and present, and while most of the chapters take place in the sixties, it is narrated from the viewpoint of Evie as an older woman. I liked that a lot, and that’s probably why I felt like Evie was quite distant as a narrator. She’s not a storyteller trying to entertain a crowd, but a woman reflecting on her past (with an unexplained fondness for adjectives…) Consequently her viewpoint is mature but sometimes fails to answer questions that we, as readers, might have.
Overall, The Girls was an interesting experience, more positive than negative. I believe that Emma Cline is a promising writer, and I’d be curious to read whatever she comes up with next. Meanwhile, if anyone wants to tell me about that wet tent thing, that’d be great! 😉
I’m always fascinated with things like the Manson clan and wonder how people fall for people like him. I’ve been wanting to read this book for a while and think I’ll enjoy it too.
You might enjoy it, as this is exactly what this book is about. I also enjoyed getting this point of view rather than the criminal/investigative side of it.
I liked this, but didn’t love it like others did. I will be curious to see what she writes next.
Yeah, I’m still hesitant about my feelings on it, but I’m certainly curious to know what her next project will be!