The Girls

If you’re as obsessed with Charles Manson as I am, you’ll love this novel, which tells the story of Evie, a bored and misguided 14-year-old girl who ends up inadvertently joining a cult that, while not directly stated to be the Manson cult, certainly alludes to it.

In this cult, the leader is Russell Hadrick, and though I find him less charismatic than Manson, he wields the same power over people. The other cult members and their eventual crime is the same as the real-world cult too. What I’m most impressed with about this book is the way it… show more.

I find dramatizations of true crime events a bit distasteful, which is why The Girls is exactly my cup of tea.

The book follows Evie, an isolated 1960s suburban teen who finds comfort in a Manson-inspired cult. A man named Russell is the elusive leader, but it's that character of Suzanne that draws Evie to the dirty ranch where the cult lives, loves, and eventually plots murder. Suzanne isn't caring or nuturing, but provides Evie with blunt doses of female reality.

There are moments in this book that really resonated with me, particularly in the moments where Suzanne functions as… show more.

This worth-the-hype, urgent debut set in the late 1960s was a formative read for me.

We get the perspective of a young teenager, Evie, who hovers like a moth around Suzanne's entrancing light. Suzanne herself belongs to a strange sisterhood of devoted followers in a Manson-Family-esque cult. Evie lets her identity and morals blur as she does anything she can to impress Suzanne.

When we’re caught at the right–or, I guess, wrong–time, obsession and codependency can feel like having a purpose. She wants to be Suzanne and be with her. I was transfixed by Evie’s melancholic outsider perspective.

I love how this book is written. It’s lyrical and deeply felt with a keen eye and luminous prose. Told from her middle-aged perspective, it’s the story of 14-year-old Evie and the summer she dallied, first at the outskirts, and then at dead center of a Charles Manson-like clan. Evie’s a lonely innocent drawn to the sexy and audacious Suzanne who is closest to the leader, Russell. All the women revere Russell, and Evie performs as required: sex, thievery, nighttime home invasions, initially just for fun. The book captures the grunge and the glory of its late-1960s setting, the ragged… show more.

The world might obsess over the charismatic men behind horrific famous killings like those of the Manson family, but Emma Cline is far more interested in the girls lurking in the shadows of those sinister figures. Their longings, the way they move through the world, their own capacity for depravity. Cline’s lonely protagonist Evie is drawn into the orbit of a group of beautiful, careless girls in thrall to a cult leader whose violent vision will drive them all toward a night of unspeakable violence. Through Evie’s intense adolescent gaze, we’re inexorably driven along too. This book was one of… show more.