This book speaks of a world I found so horrifying and dangerous
yet because it was told from the conscience and justifications of a 14 year old
girl, I could almost find myself relating. For a debut novelist, Emma Cline has
certainly demonstrated a fantastic grasp on verbalising the inner workings of
the young female mind, so this was such an exciting find!
Fourteen-year-old Evie Boyd’s attention is caught by a gang
of girls that live in her northern Californian town. With the “endless,
formless summer” stretching ahead of her, Evie is seduced by a life spent
amongst the girls in the out-of-town commune in which they inhabit. Cline’s
story is based somewhat on the Manson cult, which I actually hadn’t heard of,
but from a bit of Googling seems like a very big deal back in the 1960s. With
Charles Manson at the centre, a large group of girls carried out gruesome
murders with a pure kind of loyalty to their leader. Russell is the ‘Charles
Manson’ in this tale, but Russell is consciously cast aside in order to focus
on ‘the girls’.
Some criticism has been given to Emma Cline’s style of
writing as there is a tendency to over-dramatise the insignificant; dresses
“stuttering with loose stitching”, the “domestic rot of the kitchen sponge”. I
found that this allowed me to more vividly and sharply imagine Evie’s world,
with rich senses of colour and smell. Often these details were described when
Evie was at home and feeling listless; the rush and roar of excitement for her
new life had not yet come and she seemed to express disdain and boredom of the
everyday.
I keep saying on this blog that I don’t really enjoy books
that flick back and forth in time but once again, this one’s blown that out of
the water. We experience older, grown up Evie’s life, as she narrates the tale.
Her story as an adult is told with the same rich intensity. Sadly this Evie
doesn’t seem to have made much of her life since the commune, and the very last
passage in the book where she is walking on the beach almost willing the male passer-by
to cause her harm suggests she is still an outsider desperate to be noticed.
4/5
