Rating:  ☆☆☆

Author:   Emma Cline

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Crime

355 pages, published June 14, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Girls takes place in Northern California during the tumultuous latter part of the 1960s.   Protaganist Evie Boyd, a young teenager at loose ends after her parents’ divorce is whose desperate need for acceptance draws her to a group of girls and their charismatic leader who entice her into their cult.  Things start to unravel and Evie comes close to committing heinous violence, ala Manson Family style.

Quotes 

“That was part of being a girl–you were resigned to whatever feedback you’d get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn’t react, you were a bitch. The only thing you could do was smile from the corner they’d backed you into. Implicate yourself in the joke even if the joke was always on you.”

 

“Poor Sasha. Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of live. 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.”

 

“Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved. They noticed what we want noticed.”

 

“I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to ‘make it home safe.”

 

“At that age, I was, first and foremost, a thing to be judged, and that shifted the power in every interaction onto the other person.”

 

“I waited to be told what was good about me. […] All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”

 

 “I paid bills and bought groceries and got my eyes checked while the days crumbled away like debris from a cliff face. Life a continuous backing away from the edge.”

My Take

The Girls is an intriguing, but very disturbing, book.  It explores how young teenager Evie Boyd gets sucked into a cult because Suzanne, one of the older members, notices her and gives her attention.  It also shows how easy it is for our innate sense of right and wrong to blur so much that we justify monstrous actions.  As the parent of a sixteen year old girl, my takeaway from this book is to love my daughter unconditionally, be interested in her life and know who her friends are and how she spends her time.