Girls – their vulnerability, strength, and passion to belong – are at the heart of this stunning first novel for audiences of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of 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 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.
Emma Cline’s remarkable debut novel is gorgeously written and spellbinding, with razor-sharp precision and startling psychological insight. The Girls is a brilliant work of fiction – and an indelible portrait of girls and of the women they become.
Terrific psychological suspense, but misses the antiestablishment youth culture of the 60s “The Girls,” by debut author Emma Cline, is a mesmerizing literary thriller about one young teenager girl’s role in a fictional late-1960s Charles-Manson-like cult. The author does an outstanding job of capturing the vulnerability, flawed judgment, and over-confidence of youth. She also captures the unquenchable hunger for love which young girls possess at that time in their lives, as well as their distorted view of actions and consequences. But perhaps most remarkable, the…
Why would a normal girl join the Manson Family? A powerful story that fades as it goes along The late 1960s, Northern California. Evie Lloyd, only 14, is adrift, feeling disconnected from her parents, clinging to one close friend she doesn’t even like that much, when she spots The Girls. A group of laughing, clustered, independent young girls, in a public park, long-hair and don’t care, rummaging through a garbage bin for food. One girl shoots one glance back and Evie connects. In this strange girl, Evie sees something: certainty. Identity. Confidence of who she is and where she…
Just Being A Girl Handicapped Your Ability to Believe Yourself How many times have you turned on the news, opened a newspaper or checked out some online news source and encountered a disturbing article about a woman who colluded with her husband or boyfriend in the horrible abuse of her own child? Why, you wonder? How does this happen? And why is it so common?