Best selling novel, The Girls, by Emma Cline is an intriguing, fictitious, and illuminating look into the notorious Manson Family cult set in 1970s California, forcing readers to contemplate the loss of innocence that follows an unmistakable summer for main character, Evie Boyd.

A novel that keeps you on the edge of your seat each and every sentence? One that follows 1970s Hollywood? Or the Manson Family cult? These are all major factors of Emma Cline’s 2016 novel The Girls. Cline’s debut novel follows the dual timeline of fourteen year old Evie, who spends her summer at the cult’s ranch, and adult Evie, who still struggles to make sense of the summer in which her innocence was lost. 

Emma Cline is a Columbia MFA School of the Arts graduate from the Class of 2013. While at Columbia, she wrote the award winning short story Marion which was published in the Paris Review. After publishing The Girls in 2016, Cline has written 2020 short story collection, Daddy, and 2023 best-selling novel, The Guest (a subject of a past BwogBooks article)! Aside from her brilliant writing, Cline is the co-founder of Picture Books, an outpost publication of Gagosian Gallery which has published pieces by authors like Lydia Millet and Ottessa Moshfegh (BC ‘02). Cline currently spends her time in both Sonoma County, California and Brooklyn, New York. 

The Girls spent three months on the New York Times Bestseller List following its publication and was awarded the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel. Along with such accolades, the novel is currently in pre-production for adaptation into cinema. I can’t even begin to say how excited I am for the adaptation because of how richly descriptive and detailed the novel is. 

Set in the foothills of Hollywood in the 1970s, the main character Evie is left reeling from the set of catastrophes that have followed her the past school year. From her parents’ divorce to her falling out with her best friend Connie to her impending send-off to boarding school in the fall, Evie falls into the throes of cult leader Russell after encountering his followers in the local park and falling into their fantasy. 

However, such fantasies are corrupted by much darker undertones of sex, drugs, and murder all under the hand of Russell. Along each page, Cline invites readers to contemplate the innocence that is lost over the one summer that Evie spends at the ranch, that rocks her life permanently into adulthood. 

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