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.)

Starred review from August 29, 2016
This compelling and thought-provoking novel seeks to understand what might have motivated the young people who joined Charles Manson’s murderous cult in the 1960s, and how they were drawn under his spell. In this fictional account, middle-aged Evie looks back on the life-changing summer when she was 14, upset at her parents’ divorce, and feeling neglected and insecure. Enter Suzanne, a wild and mesmerizing older girl who draws Evie into the hippie
commune/cult led by charismatic and fanatical Russell Hadrick. Reader McClain is phenomenal, evoking the older Evie’s mature retrospection and struggle to analyze her own emotional state and the motivations of that tumultuous time, as well as the younger Evie’s yearning for acceptance and love and adventure. McClain also creates authentic, memorable voices for the other characters, including the lazy drawl of Suzanne and the seductive madness of Russell. A perfect marriage of text and narrator, this is the kind of audiobook that stays in your mind long after it’s finished. A Random House hardcover.

Starred review from May 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

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.