Emma Cline’s book The Girls is set in present day, and also at during the hippie days of 1967 in San Francisco. There (in the past), we meet our narrator Evie. Evie, is a fourteen year old who is bored, seems to pretty much hate her best friend but can’t quite shake her (since they’ve been friends forever) and, waiting for the world to unveil its secrets to her. It’s the laughter of “the girls” that opens her eyes to the possibilities around her, and […]
Break down the self, offer yourself up like dust to the universe.
In the Cannonball Read Facebook group, someone awesome posted an article called “The best books of 2016 list you get when you combine 36 “Best Books of 2016” lists.” The Girls is 6th on that list, appearing in 10 of the 36 “Best Books of 2016” lists combined for the “ultimate list.” It’s okay. Here’s what it has going for it: it’s completely real. Here’s what it has against it: it’s not new. The Girls is the story of an older woman reminiscing about that […]
‘So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act.’
Last year I read Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter and it was easily one of the best non-fiction books-hell any genre of book- I read that year. Emma Cline’s The Girls takes a fictional approach to violent cults in the late 1960s and falls short of the real life horrors. That isn’t to say The Girls isn’t a good novel- it is- it just doesn’t live up to the hype that surrounded it this summer. “They didn’t have very far to fall—I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped […]
Didn’t quite live up to the hype, but a good read nonetheless
Emma Cline’s The Girls has appeared on every list of can’t-miss books that I’ve seen so far this year. It finally came out, and I snagged a digital copy from the library. It was definitely good, even though not quite as good as I expected. “Poor girls. The world fattens them on the promise of love. How badly they need it, and how little most of them will ever get.” The Girls tells the story of Evie Boyd, now a driftless grown woman, who fell into a cult in the 1960s […]