The Girls (Random House - RRP £6.50) is the highly anticipated debut novel by American author Emma Cline. Inspired by the notorious killings of Charles Manson and his cult, the novel is a floating, dreamlike haze of 1960s female vulnerability, intimacy and brutish survival.
Narrated from the present, the protagonist Evie Boyd looks back upon her fourteen-year-old self and her involvement in sadistic and violent crimes, never quite grasping how she ended up upon her path of destruction.
A painfully ordinary girl until this point, Evie falls in love with the wild and intoxicating Suzanne, one of the cult linchpins Russell Hadric’s many young female followers. Progressively spending more time at ‘the farm’, Evie soon begins to steal and lie for the approval of her newfound ‘family’.
A painfully ordinary girl until this point, Evie falls in love with the wild and intoxicating Suzanne, one of the cult linchpins Russell Hadric’s many young female followers. Progressively spending more time at ‘the farm’, Evie soon begins to steal and lie for the approval of her newfound ‘family’.
Everything we see is through the eyes of the girls, the men, though immeasurable influential are eternally on the peripheries. Their farm is a feral place of neglect, caring, violence and love. Evie becomes subsumed into a way of living where she and the other girls allow themselves to be ignored and used by the men. Russell’s manipulation over the cult, though obviously despicable, is utterly relatable in Cline’s astute mediation upon girlhood and their struggle to survive.
It is when Cline details particulars such as the love felt between the young women that the novel is most hypnotic and surreal: “Her naked body was humble at these moments, even childish, bent at an unflattering angle as she rummaged through the trash bag of clothes. It was comforting to me, her humanness.”
This contemporary female perspective of rawness and loss of innocence is dealt with through a lightness and delicacy of touch not expected in such a well-known incident of violent and bloody ends.
It is when Cline details particulars such as the love felt between the young women that the novel is most hypnotic and surreal: “Her naked body was humble at these moments, even childish, bent at an unflattering angle as she rummaged through the trash bag of clothes. It was comforting to me, her humanness.”
This contemporary female perspective of rawness and loss of innocence is dealt with through a lightness and delicacy of touch not expected in such a well-known incident of violent and bloody ends.