The Girls The Girls

The Girls

A Novel

    • 4.0 • 1.5K Ratings
    • $14.99

Publisher Description

THE INSTANT BESTSELLER • An indelible portrait of girls, the women they become, and that moment in life when everything can go horribly wrong

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle, Financial Times, Esquire, Newsweek, Vogue, Glamour, People, The Huffington Post, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Time Out, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, Slate

Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award • Shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize • The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Emma Cline—One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists

Praise for The Girls

“Spellbinding . . . a seductive and arresting coming-of-age story.”The New York Times Book Review

“Extraordinary . . . Debut novels like this are rare, indeed.”The Washington Post

“Hypnotic.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Gorgeous.”—Los Angeles Times

“Savage.”—The Guardian

“Astonishing.”—The Boston Globe

“Superbly written.”—James Wood, The New Yorker

“Intensely consuming.”—Richard Ford

“A spectacular achievement.”—Lucy Atkins, The Times

“Thrilling.”—Jennifer Egan

“Compelling and startling.”—The Economist

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2016
June 14
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
368
Pages
PUBLISHER
Random House Publishing Group
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
2.2
MB

Customer Reviews

dr.squeezie ,

When you expect a certain character

She took you through the raw thoughts and rocky emotions of a young girl: easily influenced, and the tunnel vision of your own ego. Just to end up in a fate that somehow never was your own.

lsmarquez ,

A long ride to nowhere

I really wanted to like this. It kept my attention for the most part but it read like a book I’ve read many times before. There is no real growth, the character remains traumatized and acting as an outsider, with no real thoughts or emotions to drive them to self discovery. There is no grand finale, no unveiling of truth, just a character who recounts a time in their life that has shaped their every move and decision without any resolve or true opinions of their own. I thought the book anticlimactic, with the ending written as if the author had no more ways to exploit their character and decided to just end in a sad little paragraph that truly was neither here nor there.

rokinrev ,

Weirdly attractive

“—but the familiarity of the Day was disturbed by the oath the girls cut across regular world. Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water”

This book is disturbing. Take a teenager in the 60s with all the “angst” and trauma from a contentious divorce; add angry and lonely parents, and the loose, angry, flowing morality of California in that decade. Evie Boyd is attracted to a group of women clustered around a charismatic leader and splits her summer between her mother’s home- and new partner and Russell’s “ranch”. Neither is the best place for her to be, but both effect her.

Told from older Evie’s point of view, Emma Cline pulls out all the stops:the good, the bad, the horror and the attraction of “different” that will inform the reader and pull them into a believable tale much as an observer to a train wreck. Triggers of sex and drugs. I simply could not stop reading this.

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