the girls – Cannonball Read 17

Teenage Kicks

The Girls by Emma Cline

January 14, 2024 by Zirza Leave a Comment

It’s 1969, and 14 year old Evie is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Her parents have divorced and she lives with her early middle aged mother who is out on a self-search quest full of enemas, wheatgrass and horoscopes. Evie underperforms at school and is set to go to boarding school after the summer, and she spends her summer hanging around with her one true friend, whom she dislikes, obsessively reading magazines and following their hammy beauty routines. Evie is obsessed with […]

You’re in a cult, call your dad

July 30, 2017 by TheShitWizard Leave a Comment

Evie Boyd is the 14 year old daughter of separated and uninterested parents, whose imagination is caught one day by the sight of three girls – carefree and unselfconsciously different to everyone that surrounds her – walking through her boring, suburban life and, through a chance encounter, is slowly drawn onto the periphery of life at The Ranch, with its supposedly freewheeling lifestyle and charismatic leader, Russell. Drawn especially to Suzanne, one of The Girls that surrounds Russell, Evie watches from the sidelines as things […]

It’s all about the girls

April 28, 2017 by Gracey the Giant Leave a Comment

On the surface, The Girls, by Emma Cline, appears to be about a Manson-like figure in Northern California in the 1960s. The leader of a small, communal living group, Russell taught his small group of followers “to discover a path to truth, how to free their real selves from where it was coiled inside them.” The group consists mostly of women, and mostly of young women, who felt that being around Russell was “like a natural high… Like the sun or something. That big and […]

Cult of Personality

January 11, 2017 by Melina Leave a Comment

Emma Cline’s book The Girls is set in present day, and also at during the hippie days of 1967 in San Francisco. There (in the past), we meet our narrator Evie. Evie, is a fourteen year old who is bored, seems to pretty much hate her best friend but can’t quite shake her (since they’ve been friends forever) and, waiting for the world to unveil its secrets to her. It’s the laughter of “the girls” that opens her eyes to the possibilities around her, and […]

‘So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act.’

October 19, 2016 by Caitlin_D 4 Comments

Last year I read Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter and it was easily one of the best non-fiction books-hell any genre of book- I read that year. Emma Cline’s The Girls takes a fictional approach to violent cults in the late 1960s and falls short of the real life horrors. That isn’t to say The Girls isn’t a good novel- it is- it just doesn’t live up to the hype that surrounded it this summer. “They didn’t have very far to fall—I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped […]

Zirza on A Gothic Classic for a ReasonIt's one of those wish-you-could-read-it-again-for-the-first-time books. I loved it.
Emmalita on “It came to something when you found yourself hoping that the footsteps you heard were ghosts.”I loved the ending! I don’t think it’s been out long enough to talk about why though.
Dixie on Track Her Down by Melinda LeighI am just starting Track Her Down and I have read them all in order till now and thought I...
Roland of Gilead on How can you give us the gift of a crazy character named Rando Thoughtful and then just as suddenly take that gift away? We need to talk, Uncle Stevie.I came across this randomly years after it was written because I was searching "Random Thoughtful. But I have the...
Emmalita on “Only you, Em, would refer to heartbreak as a distraction. I think I would have a more sympathetic response if I asked to marry a bookcase.”Oh my goodness, Gallifrey was beautiful. I’m sure her mittens were gloriously murdery.

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