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 […]
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 […]
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 […]