The Girls

by Emma Cline

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812988024
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/09/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	38,796
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Emma Cline is the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls and the story collection Daddy. The Girls was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Cline’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow, received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and an O. Henry Award, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.

Read an Excerpt

Adapted from THE GIRLS by Emma Cline, available everywhere June 14th, 2016.

I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls.
 
I noticed their hair first, long and uncombed. Then their jewelry catching the sun. The three of them were far enough away that I saw only the periphery of their features, but it didn’t matter—I knew they were different from everyone else in the park. Families milling in a vague line, waiting for sausages and burgers from the open grill. Women in checked blouses scooting into their boyfriends’ sides, kids tossing eucalyptus buttons at the feral-looking chickens that overran the strip. These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile.
 
I studied the girls with a shameless, blatant gape: it didn’t seem possible that they might look over and notice me. My hamburger was forgotten in my lap, the breeze blowing in minnow stink from the river. It was an age when I’d immediately scan and rank other girls, keeping up a constant tally of how I fell short, and I saw right away that the black-haired one was the prettiest. I had expected this, even before I’d been able to make out their faces. There was a suggestion of otherworldliness hovering around her, a dirty smock dress barely covering her ass. She was flanked by a skinny redhead and an older girl, dressed with the same shabby afterthought. As if dredged from a lake. All their cheap rings like a second set of knuckles. They were messing with an uneasy threshold, prettiness and ugliness at the same time, and a ripple of awareness followed them through the park. Mothers glancing around for their children, moved by some feeling they couldn’t name. Women reaching for their boyfriends’ hands. The sun spiked through the trees, like always—the drowsy willows, the hot wind gusting over the picnic blankets—but the familiarity of the day was disturbed by the path the girls cut across the regular world. Sleek and thoughtless as sharks breaching the water.
 
1
 
It was the end of the sixties, or the summer before the end, and that’s what it seemed like, an endless, formless summer. The Haight populated with white-garbed Process members handing out their oat-colored pamphlets, the jasmine along the roads that year blooming particularly heady and full. Everyone was healthy, tan, and heavy with decoration, and if you weren’t, that was a thing, too—you could be some moon creature, chiffon over the lamp shades, on a kitchari cleanse that stained all your dishes with turmeric.
 
But that was all happening somewhere else, not in Petaluma with its low-hipped ranch houses, the covered wagon perpetually parked in front of the Hi-Ho Restaurant. The sun-scorched crosswalks. I was fourteen but looked much younger. People liked to say this to me. Connie swore I could pass for sixteen, but we told each other a lot of lies. We’d been friends all through junior high, Connie waiting for me outside classrooms as patient as a cow, all our energy subsumed into the theatrics of friendship. She was plump but didn’t dress like it, in cropped cotton shirts with Mexican embroidery, too-tight skirts that left an angry rim on her upper thighs. I’d always liked her in a way I never had to think about, like the fact of my own hands.
 
Come September, I’d be sent off to the same boarding school my mother had gone to. They’d built a well-tended campus around an old convent in Monterey, the lawns smooth and sloped. Shreds of fog in the mornings, brief hits of the nearness of salt water. It was an all-girls school, and I’d have to wear a uniform—low-heeled shoes and no makeup, middy blouses threaded with navy ties. It was a holding place, really, enclosed by a stone wall and populated with bland, moon-faced daughters. Camp Fire Girls and Future Teachers shipped off to learn 160 words a minute, shorthand. To make dreamy, overheated promises to be one another’s bridesmaids at Royal Hawaiian weddings.
 
My impending departure forced a newly critical distance on my friendship with Connie. I’d started to notice certain things, almost against my will. How Connie said, “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone else,” as if we were shopgirls in London instead of inexperienced adolescents in the farm belt of Sonoma County. We licked batteries to feel a metallic jolt on the tongue, rumored to be one-eighteenth of an orgasm. It pained me to imagine how our twosome appeared to others, marked as the kind of girls who belonged to each other. Those sexless fixtures of high schools.
 
Every day after school, we’d click seamlessly into the familiar track of the afternoons. Waste the hours at some industrious task: following Vidal Sassoon’s suggestions for raw egg smoothies to strengthen hair or picking at blackheads with the tip of a sterilized sewing needle. The constant project of our girl selves seeming to require odd and precise attentions.
 
As an adult, I wonder at the pure volume of time I wasted. The feast and famine we were taught to expect from the world, the countdowns in magazines that urged us to prepare thirty days in advance for the first day of school.
 
Day 28: Apply a face mask of avocado and honey.
 
Day 14: Test your makeup look in different lights (natural, office, dusk).
 
Back then, I was so attuned to attention. I dressed to provoke love, tugging my neckline lower, settling a wistful stare on my face whenever I went out in public that implied many deep and promising thoughts, should anyone happen to glance over. As a child, I had once been part of a charity dog show and paraded around a pretty collie on a leash, a silk bandanna around its neck. How thrilled I’d been at the sanctioned performance: the way I went up to strangers and let them admire the dog, my smile as indulgent and constant as a salesgirl’s, and how vacant I’d felt when it was over, when no one needed to look at me anymore.
 
I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you—the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.
 
Adapted from THE GIRLS by Emma Cline. Copyright © 2016 by Emma Cline. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Reading Group Guide

1. The Girls takes place in the summer of 1969. When Evie explains the era to Sasha, she says “It was a different time … Everyone ran around” (144). Do you think that what happened to Evie could have only happened in the 1960s? Or is her story a timeless story? How might her story be different, if it happened today?

2. One of the central relationships in The Girls is between Evie and Suzanne. What did you make of their connection? The first time they meet, Suzanne is hesitant to let Evie come along (94-95). Does she sense something about Evie from the very beginning? What might it be?

3. Evie describes the “constant project of our girl selves” and the specific attentions that project requires—the make-up, the grooming rituals. Did you see a parallel in Evie’s mother’s behavior? What are the similarities and differences between Evie’s “constant project” and her mother’s new search for “an aim, a plan”?

4. 1. In looking back at the time before her parents got divorced, Evie describes “the freedom of being so young that no one expected anything from me” (78). Do you think that freedom still exists when she is a teenager—or has it already disappeared? Why might that sense of freedom start to vanish, as she gets older?

5. Evie delineates the difference between the attention girls can get from boys, and the attention they can get from other girls: “Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved” (34). What do you make of this? Is something all of the girls in this story are aware of, consciously or unconsciously? Do you think it holds true forever, or does it change as girls grow older?

6. At the same time, though, Evie says that she “didn’t really believe friendship could be an end in itself, not just the background fuzz to the dramatics of boys loving you or not loving you” (49). How does this notion change and evolve as the story goes on? Do you consider Evie’s relationship with Suzanne to be a friendship, or something different?

7. Evie is constantly sizing up other girls and women, measuring their beauty and assessing them “with brutal and emotionless judgment” (34). But Suzanne, she decides, “wasn’t beautiful … It was something else” (68). How does this complicate her understanding of, or attraction to, Suzanne? Is beauty something that is valued by Russell, Suzanne and others, in the world of the ranch?

8. What did you make of Evie’s dynamic with Sasha? What similarities to—and differences from—her teenage self might Evie see in Sasha? Why do you think Evie tells Sasha so much about her past?

9. Why do you think Evie decides to mess with Teddy Dutton, when she brings his dog back to his house? Does she have a newfound feeling of power, after spending time at the ranch? Do you think that interaction with Teddy paves the way for her and the girls’ later intrusion into the Dutton house?

10. Were you surprised by the character of Tamar, and her relationship with Evie? How does Tamar differ from the other girls and women in the story—from Suzanne, from Connie, from Evie’s mother?

11. Looking back, Evie questions whether she might have known what Suzanne and the others were planning, and whether she would have participated: “Maybe I would have done something, too. Maybe it would have been easy” (321). Do you think Evie would have gone through with it, if she had stayed in the car? Why, or why not?

12. At the end, Evie describes Suzanne letting her go as “a gift” (351), allowing Evie to have the normal life that Suzanne herself could not. But she reflects that it might have been easier to be punished and redeemed, as Suzanne was. What did you make of Evie’s still-conflicted feelings about that chapter in her life? Would it ever be possible for someone in Evie’s situation to make peace with the past? If so, what do you think prevents her from doing so?

Editorial Reviews

Spellbinding . . . A seductive and arresting coming-of-age story hinged on Charles Manson, told in sentences at times so finely wrought they could almost be worn as jewelry . . . [Emma] Cline gorgeously maps the topography of one loneliness-ravaged adolescent heart. She gives us the fictional truth of a girl chasing danger beyond her comprehension, in a Summer of Longing and Loss.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[The Girls reimagines] the American novel . . . Like Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica or Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, The Girls captures a defining friendship in its full humanity with a touch of rock-memoir, tell-it-like-it-really-was attitude.”—Vogue

“Debut novels like this are rare, indeed. . . . The most remarkable quality of this novel is Cline’s ability to articulate the anxieties of adolescence in language that’s gorgeously poetic without mangling the authenticity of a teenager’s consciousness. The adult’s melancholy reflection and the girl’s swelling impetuousness are flawlessly braided together. . . . For a story that traffics in the lurid notoriety of the Manson murders, The Girls is an extraordinary act of restraint. With the maturity of a writer twice her age, Cline has written a wise novel that’s never showy: a quiet, seething confession of yearning and terror.”—The Washington Post

“Outstanding . . . Cline’s novel is an astonishing work of imagination—remarkably atmospheric, preternaturally intelligent, and brutally feminist. . . . Cline painstakingly destroys the separation between art and faithful representation to create something new, wonderful, and disorienting.”—The Boston Globe

“Finely intelligent, often superbly written, with flashingly brilliant sentences, . . . Cline’s first novel, The Girls, is a song of innocence and experience. . . . In another way, though, Cline’s novel is itself a complicated mixture of freshness and worldly sophistication. . . . At her frequent best, Cline sees the world exactly and generously. On every other page, it seems, there is something remarkable—an immaculate phrase, a boldly modifying adverb, a metaphor or simile that makes a sudden, electric connection between its poles. . . . Much of this has to do with Cline’s ability to look again, like a painter, and see (or sense) things better than most of us do.”—The New Yorker

“Breathtaking . . . So accomplished that it’s hard to believe it’s a debut. Cline’s powerful characters linger long after the final page.”—Entertainment Weekly (Summer Must List)

“A mesmerizing and sympathetic portrait of teen girls.”—People (Summer’s Best Books)

“The Girls isn’t a Wikipedia novel, it’s not one of those historical novels that congratulates the present on its improvements over the past, and it doesn’t impose today’s ideas on the old days. As the smartphone-era frame around Evie’s story implies, Cline is interested in the Manson chapter for the way it amplifies the novel’s traditional concerns. Pastoral, marriage plot, crime story—the novel of the cult has it all.”—New York Magazine

From the Publisher

Emma Cline on the Dark Side of Girl Power

A lonely teenage girl, her last summer at home before boarding school, an intriguing gang of older, louche girls in a local park. It's northern California at the end of the 1960s, and these girls are coming of age at the edge of unspeakable violence. Written in seductive, luminous prose, Emma Cline's haunting novel, The Girls, captures the experience of crossing between adolescence and adulthood, questioning what we're willing to do to belong and to be seen.

The reviews continue to land, and they are all phenomenal. "Arresting," "stunning," "mesmerizing and sympathetic" -- and that's just a start. They continue: "An astonishing work of imagination, "remarkably atmospheric, preternaturally intelligent, and brutally feminist," "a wise novel that's never showy," "a quiet, seething confession of yearning and terror."

A few weeks ago Emma Cline and her editor, Kate Medina, executive vice president, associate publisher, executive editorial director at Random House, took the stage at Barnes & Noble on Manhattan's Upper West Side to talk about the genesis of this remarkable novel. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. --Miwa Messer, Director, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers

Kate Medina: One of the things I found remarkable about your book, as you know, is your profound understanding of adolescent girls and of the women they become. I remember asking you when you came in to see me, "How do you know so much about girls?" How do you?

Emma Cline: Well, there's one easy, obvious answer -- that I was a girl. But then, I also have four younger sisters, which is quite a lot of adolescents to be in one house together, as I'm sure my mother would agree. So there's five girls in my family, as well as two boys, and all five of us are very close in age. It was really one right after the other. So just five teenage girls in one house, which is like an illness in the household. You should stay away. There should be a sign over the door.

You experience something as an adolescent girl, and maybe it doesn't imprint on you, but you see it repeated four times in quick succession, and you start to see patterns and sort of think about the way that girls and women are treated in the world.

KM: That's one really strong draw, I think, to this novel. In the New York Times feature about you, Emma, you spoke about driving past Charles Manson's house as a child. Would you tell us about your background and how it inspired this novel.

EC: That was a huge part of why I came to this story. I'm from California, northern California, which is still very haunted by the '60s. They're still sort of dealing with the leftovers of this era, which was so important. So I sort of grew up in the shadow of it. Yeah, we would drive past San Quentin, which is a prison, when I was little, when I was six or seven, and my parents would say, "That's Charles Manson's house." And in the way of little kids, I really thought he lived there. I thought that's an awfully big house, but I was also really scared of him. He was sort of my version of the Bogeyman growing up.

Then, as I got older, I read Helter Skelter. That was the first thing I read about the Manson Family. Which I think a lot of teenagers sort of find magnetically somehow; they're just drawn to this tawdry true-crime book. I read that, and I remember being so fascinated that the women involved, the girls were really only a few years older than I was at the time when I first read it. That's who I was interested in, in the story. I wasn't so interested in Manson, who I think we all know quite a bit about at this time, and I don't know that there's much new information that has a lot of texture. But to me, the girls . . . there was some space left over for a novelist.

KM: I think that is what we're finding many readers relate to is your understanding of the powerful longing in girls to be seen, acknowledged, and belong. One of the messages we get on Facebook a lot about this book is: What would you do to belong? I think about this aspect of the girls in your novel when I read about ISIS, young women called "brides of ISIS" who leave Canada, the United Kingdom, and other places, vulnerable to falling into that kind of attachment. I'm wondering if you'd say more about that kind of vulnerable time in a girl's life.

EC: Yes -- this book is set mostly in the '60s, but to me there is something about the story that really could happen at any moment, and, like you're saying, the teenage girls who sort of ran away to join ISIS -- it's not something that was only specific to 1969. I think the desire to belong and be part of something larger, and to really be seen and noticed, is such a primal desire and won't ever really go away. I think that's what animates a lot of the book, and what makes it to me . . . The cult aspect is interesting to me, but it's a way of talking about what I'm really interested in, which is the lives of girls and sort of that yearning, and how does the world treat that yearning -- how do they take advantage of it?

I think it's also an age when young women are testing the boundaries of the world around them. I think we teach young women that the world is dangerous for them specifically. So if you've been raised that way, how do you find your way in the world? Could you maybe want to seek out danger? Because that's a way of figuring out how will the world treat you. That's a moment where you have excitement or power over your own life in a world that often leaves you powerless.

KM: Some other reviewers have focused on the Mansonesque aspects of Russell, who is the charismatic center of the cult. And other books have been written about California's dark side and the male leaders, with women as bit players, I think you once said. But you wanted to write about the girls. Would you say a little more about that, and why you made girls the center of the story?

EC: Yeah. Like I said, and as you've mentioned, we almost have this interchangeable idea of what a cult leader looks like, and a lot of them came out of northern California. Go, California! Gerald Stone, Jim Jones, Manson . . . In many ways, they are very similar. I think we're familiar with the psychological profile of these people. I think in this book I really like that Russell is actually the side character. In a book that people might call, like, a Manson Book or a Mansonesque book, I really like the idea of sort of putting that meat to the side. It's been funny. It's mostly been men, but they've been like, Why not more about this fascinating Russell character?

But to me, yeah, I love that his orbit around these women, actually, is in many ways incidental to the plot.

KM: It's also very interesting in this novel how Evie gradually begins to see who he really is. It's very sophisticated and very marvelous, how you do that.

EC: I think an older reader can see right away that he's not anything very special, but to a fourteen-year-old girl, somebody who is sort of saying the things they want to hear -- but I also love that the reason Evie really gets interested in the group is because of Suzanne, an older girl, and not because of this man, that it's really like this projection and this intense friendship that acts as the incident that sort of gets her involved.

KM: I remember wanting to read your novel fast, to find out what was going to happen, and slow, to savor the words and the writing. I guess if a writer can ever say: How did you learn to write like this? You have an MFA from Columbia. What did you learn about writing there, and how did you develop this amazing voice?

EC: I think as a reader, I've always been drawn to books that create their own world, and that sort of are very immersive, and you learn how to read them as you go on. So I loved the idea of this book that functions as its own visual universe almost. I was thinking of other books that I really enjoyed. I think The Virgin Suicides is one that you immediately are sort of indoctrinated almost into this writer's tone and style. And Lorrie Moore, too. Other writers who sort of work at a heightened pitch, I think. That was important to me.

It mostly comes from reading so much and really thinking about what I enjoy as a reader. Which is also what was great about going to an MFA program. Because you're forced to confront the fact of readers, and if you're working alone, you can sort of project all kinds of things onto your own work that may or may not be there. But readers will tell you. So that was important to me, to respect the reading experience when I read this book.

KM: So it was workshopped?

EC: I actually never really workshopped this novel. I was mostly workshopping short stories, just because the structure of an MFA doesn't really lend itself to workshopping novels. So really my main reader while I was writing this book was one of my four younger sisters. It turns out you can make your younger sister read twelve drafts of a book! So she was my proto-editor. And I sort of bribed her with many treats, but she read my drafts. And in many ways, she's sort of my ideal reader, I think. So she told me when I was going in the right direction.

KM: Did your understanding of girls and women evolve or deepen as you wrote your way through this book or as you heard people talk about the book and respond to it? I guess I wondered whether the writing of the book and the publishing of the book affected the way you think about girls and women. Was there any change that you remember noticing?

EC: For me, it's been really gratifying hearing that the book has been meaningful to people, especially young women, but also anyone who has been a young woman or knows a young woman. What I wanted to do in writing the book was, I think, present a complex portrait of girls and sort of let them be more than the one-note characterizations that I think are so prevalent in the way that we talk about teenage girls especially. I think we have very flat characterizations of them and give them so little subjectivity and agency. So writing a book with these girls at the center who are allowed to be more than victims -- sometimes they are people who victimize other people. Or something terrible can happen, and they might almost like it. They have all these complex feelings, which I think is real to how girls and women experience the world.

I know for me, as a big reader, it's rare to come across this. I remember one of the first times I really did. I don't know if any of have you read Diary of a Teenage Girl or seen the movie, which was also great. But my heart started pounding a little faster when I was reading, because I just thought, Oh, here it is. That's something I really wanted to do with this book, too.

KM: A lot of the messaging online in praise of the girls has to do with what's called the "near miss" in a girl or a woman's life, that moment when everything could go horribly wrong. Were you aware of this kind of common or universal possible connection that people would be making to this book?

EC: Yes. And I've definitely heard a lot more stories as the book has been out in the world. But I think it's something that was true with most of the women I know. Just that they experienced girlhood as this very dangerous moment, and that they were sort of going right up to the edge of things all the time, that sort of way of testing boundaries, and they felt that it was almost an accident that nothing bad happened, or that nothing worse happened. I think a lot of that points to the way that we treat women and girls and the way our society is structured -- that it's such a vulnerable population.

KM: There is in the book some commentary about the stereotypes out there of women, with which you're at odds. So Evie identifies common female stereotypes by saying, "That was part of being a girl. You were resigned to whatever feedback you get. If you got mad, you were crazy, and if you didn't react, you were a bitch." That encapsulates many of the sentiments about female adolescence throughout the book. Would you want to speak about that line?

EC: Sure. It's grim to hear it repeated back, because I think it's somewhat true that we do give girls this tiny little real estate to sort of exist in, when, of course, they are full human beings. And can you write a book that gives them back their full humanity? Yeah.

KM: One of the things that I admired about this book is that you let us see all the people of different ages in this book as real people. Particularly your portrayal of Evie's mother and father, who really do kind of drop the ball and leave her on her own this summer, and also to Mara, her father's girlfriend, in that you make them real people. They are not all bad or all good. They are just people. So it's a surprise, and one of the many surprises in this book, who comes through for Evie. Tell me how you feel, for example, about Evie's mother. I found her quite sympathetic, trying in the '60s way to put her life together again after a divorce.

EC: It was really important to me that no one be 100 percent bad or good, because again, I don't think that's how the world operates. I think it's actually what's most frightening about something . . . you know, a crime like there is at the center of this book, is that it's often committed by people who you can see their humanity at the same time that you can see this horror. And what does it mean to be able to see both of those things, and have you make sense of it? Or can you even make sense? The parents don't commit any terrible crimes, but to the teenage Evie, I think she really experiences then not as monsters but as people who are just letting her down so brutally.

But that's what's nice about having an older narrator -- you get to comment and contextualize on this almost suffocating point of view that is like a fourteen-year-old girl's point of view. I feel like when you're a teenager, you can't really accept nuance or gray area. You have this real purity almost in your commitment to your ideals or the sense that the world is very black-and-white. The definition of adulthood is compromise and nuance, the gray area. That's the realm of being an adult, unfortunately.

KM: Can you love someone who has done something terrible? How would you answer that question?

EC: I think that's a lot of what the book is about, that Evie has had this intense relationship with Suzanne, the older girl who draws her into this group, and she is still struggling with this many decades later, to form some narrative about what it meant or who Suzanne was to her. They might be able to meet again as adults, and you might be able to get some resolution about this person who resists any kind of easy reading. But I like the idea that in this book she never gets that closure. That felt very true to life to me, that these people can come and have a huge impact on you, and maybe for the rest of your life you would be trying to come up with a story to tell yourself about what that meant.

KM: One of the things I love most about this novel is that in roughly the last half of the book, many things happen that are not actually explained. So with some of the turning points at the end of the novel, you have to kind of figure out what you think happened. How did you manage to resist telling us what happened?

EC: I think, honestly, the character doesn't quite know, so that's easier to sort of occupy as the writer, too -- that not-knowing. But also, that's what I'm most interested in in art and fiction especially, is these ambiguous moments. For me, I was thinking a lot about sort of moral luck with this book. One of the examples that's most used is, like: Is somebody who drives drunk but doesn't kill anyone as culpable as someone who drives drunk and happens to get in a car accident where someone dies? The accident of the way our lives turn out. And also, what would it mean to you if you could feel your proximity to something so terrible and sort of never know what your culpability, your moral responsibility really was in that moment? That to me seems a rich well to draw from for fiction.

--July 18, 2016

The Barnes & Noble Review

… a seductive and arresting coming-of-age story hinged on Charles Manson, told in sentences at times so finely wrought they could almost be worn as jewelry. It reimagines the summer leading up to the notorious Tate-LaBianca murders in Los Angeles in August 1969, and it dissects an obsession—but not the one you'd expect…Cline gorgeously maps the topography of one loneliness-ravaged adolescent heart. She gives us the fictional truth of a girl chasing danger beyond her comprehension, in a Summer of Longing and Loss.

The New York Times Book Review - Dylan Landis

★ 02/15/2016
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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

★ 05/15/2016
It is the summer of 1969 in Northern California, and 14-year-old Evie Boyd is bored and lonely. Ignored by her recently divorced parents and alienated from her friend Connie, Evie is intrigued by a trio of hippie girls she spots in a local park, studying them "with a shameless, blatant gape." Their dirty smock dresses, long uncombed hair, and careless independent manner are so different from Evie's own neat and tidy childish world, and she longs to be accepted by them, especially by cool, otherworldly Suzanne. Edie starts small, offering to shoplift toilet paper and then stealing money from her preoccupied mother to impress Suzanne and Russell, the girls' charismatic leader. Before long, she is hanging out at the group's rundown communal ranch in the hills, feeling for the first time that she's part of a family—even though this "family" happens to be a cult that will soon be making headlines in the most horrific way. VERDICT Although inspired by the infamous Charles Manson murders, Cline's impressive debut is more a harrowing coming-of-age exploration of how far a young girl will go (and how much she will give up of herself) in her desperate quest to belong. Beautifully written and unforgettable. [See Prepub Alert, 1/4/16; "Editors' Spring Picks," LJ 2/15/16, p. 32.]—Wilda Williams, Library Journal

Library Journal

Narrator Cady McClain is extraordinary here, her diction perfect, her performance of every sentence thoughtful, unforced, yet hypervigilant. The phenomenon of the group around Charles Manson, their motives and murders, continues to mystify, yet fascinate. Who were the people who fell for what Manson was selling, and if they weren’t all insane, how did it go so far? Emma Cline has found a brilliant way to see it new, by imagining the girls around a Manson-like character, showing how his power over them works and how these acolytes in turn draw in Cline’s vulnerable protagonist, 14-year-old Evie Boyd. Cline’s psychology is acute, and her writing is dazzling. McClain remains invisible, but you never forget the jeopardy that underlies every scene as Evie drifts toward the unimaginable. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2016 - AudioFile

2016-03-15
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.

Kirkus Reviews