The Guest

I love an audacious woman, even if she is a hot mess. This book follows Alex, a young woman who’s been staying at the Hamptons with an older man. She’s a calculated person, good at capitalizing on the good natures and human weaknesses of others, but a small misstep brings her free ride with the older man to an end. Instead of leaving, she decides to linger on Long Island.

Each night, she finds a new person to graft, a new scheme to help her stay. Spending time with Alex was stressful and made me want to shake her for… show more.

This book was like the tensest and most darkly compelling roller coaster ride that I could not get off until the devastating final page.

Emma Cline is so good at delineating the messy inner lives of young women. In this book, she charts with almost real-time microscopic detail the weeklong meltdown of one pretty, very lost young woman, Alexa, as she perpetrates fraud after fraud on members of a uberwealthy summer town in the Hamptons, as well as their staffers and servants.

I was agog at Alexa’s brazenness, horrified and touched by her obvious unwellness and chilled by her ever-increasing… show more.

The Guest is a brilliant novel about a woman who is lost as she drifts from house to house in the Hamptons, looking for a home.

The main character is hard to like at first, but in the end, she will break your heart. It’s gripping, uncomfortable at times, and reads like the best kind of literary thriller: a stunning achievement and a worthy successor to The Girls. 

Again not an original choice, but I couldn’t put The Guest down. I loved it because Emma Cline has this way of creating characters that are simultaneously specific and vague.

The whole time you’re reading, you have no idea how the main character, Alex, has burned her life to the ground, where she comes from, or who she actually is, but you can’t look away from her because she’s so consistent in her pretty horrifying behavior.

It’s one of those books where you really don’t want to relate to the protagonist, but a part of me did: the way Alex… show more.

Cline’s novel is one of the most unsettling books I read this summer.

Readers follow the protagonist as she slowly and inescapably sinks lower and lower, all while losing her grip on reality. In almost every chapter, she disrupts, if not ruins, the lives of the people she uses in various schemes in the hopes of convincing the older rich man whom she had been sleeping with to take her back.

The novel has a languid pace, but there are so many exquisite passages peppered throughout the creeping dread as you watch the protagonist’s increasingly destructive choices play out.