The Girls

Loosely based on the Manson cult, this book unfolds a grim and fascinating story about a teenage girl in the summer of '69. When her parents divorce and their parenting gets less and less affectional, she finds herself drawn to a group of girls, who seem to have no care in the world - except for their leader Russel. Soon she finds she would do anything for her new friends... Really anything?

I mean this is prob good to somebody, but I’m apparently not that person. I really wanted to like this, I tried, but I just can't connect with the story, not even bc I can't relate (who could?) but it just didn't get through to me at all. I couldn't develop any actual interest in any of the characters and felt like I was just waiting for the finale. To be quite honest, before going in I was unaware this was just straight-up the Charles Manson story (with only minor changes (Location, Victims)). Technically it’s loosely based, but there is just a lot of overlap and I probably wouldn't have picked it up as excitedly if I had known. Frankly, I think 'The Girls' is a very uninteresting take on that whole ordeal. The Manson Family is a very famous cult and also a very old story, so maybe 50 years later (at the time of release) there are just not that many interesting takes to be had on them. Additionally, the amount of explicit sex made me uncomfortable. Even if it’s mainly a tool, to portray her relationship with Suzanne and men in general, Evie is still 14 most of the time lol. I thought the writing itself was pretty annoying and really just insists upon itself. It WANTS you to think it’s so profound and lyrical, which, like, yes, books can be written poetically, but this was just giving teenager who thinks they did something. Also, the politics of this cult were only ever mentioned in passing, beyond the general Love & Peace bs of this era, but I still noticed how she says explicitly that they were against racism. Just irks me, because notoriously Manson was a white supremacist and the Manson family were a violently racist group.. I don't want to accuse Emma Cline of anything but changing that is just a little weird to me.