The Girls

Starred review from February 15, 2016
A middle-aged woman looks back on her experience with a California cult reminiscent of the Manson Family in Cline’s provocative, wonderfully written debut. Fourteen years old in the summer of 1969, Evie Boyd enjoys financial privilege and few parental restrictions. Yet she’s painfully aware that she is fascinated by girls, awkward with boys, and overlooked by her divorced parents, who are preoccupied with their own relationships. When Evie meets “raunchy and careless” Suzanne Parker, she finds in the 19-year-old grifter an assurance she herself lacks. Suzanne lives at a derelict ranch with the followers of charismatic failed musician Russell Hadrick, who extols selflessness and sexual freedom. Soon, Evie—grateful for Russell’s attention, the sense of family the group offers, and Suzanne’s seductive presence—is swept into their chaotic existence. As the mood at the ranch turns dark, her choices become riskier. The novel’s title is apt: Cline is especially perceptive about the emulation and competition, the longing and loss, that connect her novel’s women and their difficult, sometimes destructive passages to adulthood. Its similarities to the Manson story and crimes notwithstanding, The Girls is less about one night of violence than about the harm we can do, to ourselves and others, in our hunger for belonging and acceptance. Agent: Bill Clegg, the Clegg Agency.

February 1, 2016

Cline gets to prove why she won the 2014 Paris Review Plimpton Prize with this first novel featuring lonesome teen Evie Boyd, who's drawn to a bunch of louche and daring-looking girls in the park, particularly ringleader Suzanne. Soon Evie is part of a cult, based on a ranch deep in the hills and led by a dangerously charismatic man, that will make headlines in the worst possible way. A look at adolescent desperation for acceptance; big in-house enthusiasm.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2016
An award-winning young author uses Charles Manson and his followers as the inspiration for her first novel. Evie Boyd is in a city park the first time she sees the girls. With their bare feet and long hair and secondhand dresses they offer a vision of life beyond her suburban, upper-middle-class experience. "Like royalty in exile," they suggest the possibility of another world, a world separate from the wreckage of her parents' marriage, from the exacting lessons gleaned from teen magazines, from the unending effort of trying to be appealing. What 14-year-old Evie can't see that day is that these girls aren't any freer than she is. Shifting between the present and the summer of 1969, this novel explores the bitter dregs of 1960s counterculture. Narrating from middle age, Evie--like the reader--knows what's going to happen. But Evie has had decades to analyze what she did and what was done to her, and Cline peoples her version of this oft-examined story with carefully crafted characters. The star in Evie's solar system isn't Russell, the Manson stand-in. Instead, it's Suzanne, the young woman who becomes Evie's surrogate mother, sister, lover, and--finally--protector. This book is, among other things, a love story. Cline makes old news fresh, but she also succumbs to an MFA's fondness for strenuously inventive language: "Donna spooked her hands dreamily." "The words slit with scientific desire." "I felt the night churn in me like a wheel." These metaphors are more baffling than illuminating. And Evie's conclusion that patriarchal culture might turn any girl deadly feels powerfully true at first but less so upon reflection. Suzanne and her accomplices don't turn on their oppressor like righteous Maenads; instead, they sacrifice themselves on his behalf. And there's also the simple fact that very few girls become mass murderers. Vivid and ambitious.

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Starred review from May 15, 2016
Bored teenager Evie Boyd is mesmerized by a young woman she spots wandering through a park one summer afternoon. It's 1969 in Petaluma, California, and Suzanne represents the glamour of the counterculture to lonely Evie, whose newly divorced mother dabbles in the watered-down, pseudo-hippie trends typical of the era. A second encounter brings Evie firmly into Suzanne's orbit and introduces Evie to a family of hangers-on surrounding Russell, a charismatic musician who holds court at a dilapidated ranch just outside town. Soon Evie is spending her free time at the ranch, dumpster-diving for food, getting high with her new friends, and buying into Russell's philosophies of free love and communal living. But there's a darker side to life at the ranch, and hard drugs and isolation begin to feed the family's paranoia, leading to a devastating, violent act. Using the Manson family and the Tate-LaBianca murders as her template, Cline pushes past the myths, vividly imagining how the darkness crept in and turned a group of idealistic young adults into cold-blooded killers. In her impressive debut, Cline illuminates the darkest truths of a girl's coming-of-age, telling a story that is familiar on multiple levels in a unique and compelling way.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)