Emma Cline’s The Girls is a beautifully written and deeply disturbing book about a young girl’s involvement in a cult in the late 60s.
In reading this book you will get a gorgeous sense of summer in the 60s, stunning descriptions with clear visual imagery. But you’ll also get brutal and graphic descriptions of acts of violence and abuse. The balance between the two is immensely chilling, they way Cline goes between the innocence of our main character to then shocking scenes of sexual abuse shows their immense talent as a writer and understanding of their craft.
This story is reflectively being looked back on by an older, adult version of our main character as she mentally relives experiences from her teen years. It’s interesting to look at it through her own eyes, but also to see the contrast of her younger and older selves. We see the present day version of the main character interacting with teens who judge her for her past, whilst making poor decisions in their present. There’s a clear parallel running through this book that we never truly learn from past generations mistakes, or even our own mistakes, we just change the shape of how we make them.
Coming off the back of reading Deep Cuts, a book so deeply engrained in music it has left me itching for more, I’d have to love to see more music reference in a book set in this era. There was talk of songs and artists, but they were never named, so I assume they were just fictional. But you can’t deny the perfect vibes in this book, it feels like jumping into a time machine right back to the 1960s. The settings are mostly limited to a few different houses and the ranch where the cult lives, but I think this was perfect to make the story feel more intimate and emphasise how terrifying the acts of the story are.
This has definitely left me with a need to rewatch Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a film that also follows a cult in the 60s. Very different plots, but I’ve been left craving more about this way of living and how society was in the 60s. A fascinating read, I highly recommend it!
