The Girls

I enjoyed the author's writing style for the most part, though occasionally she would try to create metaphors while picking a word that didn't make sense, like someone who's first language isn't English. Like using broody here “Creeping along the hallway like a specter in shortie pajamas, their polyester slickness stuck in the broody stretch between princess costumes and lingerie,” or bellow here “like when I smelled the bellow of iron in the bathroom and knew she had her period. “ She's basically saying that Evie smelled a sound - it doesn't really work.

I found Evie, the main character, to be profoundly unlikable. I couldn't connect with her on any level. The author writes about women and girls in the light of the apparent sexism of the era, but without any sort of redemption for either the men or women of the story. She writes Evie thinking things like “I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board,” as if they were universal truths and not just Evie and her cult girlfriends messed up perspectives. The book is entirely from Evie's point of view, and the view is incredibly narrow and self centered.

When I got to Part Four, the brief coda of Evie arriving at boarding school, I thought back on all the preceding chapters and wished that the book had started at where the author chose to wrap things up. There was no suspense leading up to the murders, the reader already knows what happens before the first page, since the story of Charles Manson is very well known. So the slow integration of a bored and narcissistic 14 year old into their cult is kind of sad and dull. The aftermath is where I really started to get interested, but the book ends shortly after.

Also, we're supposed to be left wondering if Evie was indeed capable of murder. But I didn't have any doubts, she would have done anything Suzanne wanted her to do.