Amy P. Knight

The Girls by Emma Cline

I started this because the premise sounded fun (a girl caught up in a Charles Manson-like debacle) but I ended up really enjoying other things about it. It’s full of descriptions and metaphors that are wholly original and exactly right, without ever feeling forced or overdone. It has a past-present kind of structure that is executed deftly and winds up having a purpose in the book as a whole besides just getting the story told. And as it nears the end, there’s a kind of shift in the narrator’s thinking that casts everything before in a different and intriguing light. (In this way it’s like The Witch Elm).

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a book called The Girls has a fierce feminist streak…