Notes on The Girls by Emma Cline

***warning: spoilers***

My first comment about this novel is that I honestly do not understand the point of it. Perhaps it’s the way Emma Cline was able to place words accurately on the adolescent girl experience, which she did well, I admit, but what’s the point of that if you don’t do anything with it.

Secondly, every passage seems to have been rewritten with a thesaurus, one that offers a very limited selection of uncreative synonyms. There were three instances that she used “like a boy” to describe a woman’s personality or appearance which is also painfully sexist. The thing is, these repetitions were not poetics. In fact, they bridged on accidental for me, and I found myself cringing at these descriptions of people and experience, descriptions that were way, way, way overdone.

From the get-go, I had no interest in this novel. The only feature that kept me going was the fact that I knew Manson murders were on the horizon. And then. Nothing. I am so disappointed. I was hoping there would be a new POV of the murders, something new out of this tragedy. Nothing. The only this Cline did was take an existing story and tell it from the point of a very boring character.

Not a single one of the characters interested me. I felt no affection, no connection. Not at a single point was I rooting for anyone. Because of this, I thought the purpose of the novel would be the gore of the massacres, but even that didn’t occur. So then I thought the purpose was to demonstrate how getting involved in this type of situation could have been natural or human. To show how it could happen to anyone and to make it so we could honestly relate to Evie. Nope. This didn’t work at all.

So at the end of the day, I don’t understand this book. No significant change of heart. Just a tiny “epiphany” from the main character, though that word is barely appropriate. If you’re into the Manson family, gore, or the human experience of young girls coming of age, I do not recommend this. It will leave you unsatisfied and like you wasted your time.