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 […]
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 […]
Cult of Personality
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 […]
‘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 […]