Evie Boyd is the 14 year old daughter of separated and uninterested parents, whose imagination is caught one day by the sight of three girls – carefree and unselfconsciously different to everyone that surrounds her – walking through her boring, suburban life and, through a chance encounter, is slowly drawn onto the periphery of life at The Ranch, with its supposedly freewheeling lifestyle and charismatic leader, Russell. Drawn especially to Suzanne, one of The Girls that surrounds Russell, Evie watches from the sidelines as things […]
Growing Up Is Hard Even Without LSD
This book takes place in the late 1960s, around the summer of love. I wasn’t around then, so I’m sure that a lot of my ideas of that time are influenced by popular culture. This isn’t one of those books that glamorizes that era, but seems to exist solely in between the two worlds of structured society and drug-saturated counterculture. The protagonist is Evie, a girl that would be described as “fourteen going on thirty.” Evie is a bit of an outsider in her own […]
It’s all about the girls
On the surface, The Girls, by Emma Cline, appears to be about a Manson-like figure in Northern California in the 1960s. The leader of a small, communal living group, Russell taught his small group of followers “to discover a path to truth, how to free their real selves from where it was coiled inside them.” The group consists mostly of women, and mostly of young women, who felt that being around Russell was “like a natural high… Like the sun or something. That big and […]
A long time ago, being crazy meant something. Now everybody is crazy.
Okay—here’s the thing: This book won all sorts of awards and I think I put it on my audiobook list because I saw it recommended everywhere. But here’s what bothers me: It’s a fictional portrayal of a fictional girl who was a satellite member of a fictional Manson family, but it borrows almost every detail from the real Manson family so…why bother with the fictional names for everyone and everything? Just make it straight up historical fiction at that point. I don’t know, maybe this […]