Ratings47
Average rating3.5
A young woman pretends to be someone she isn’t in this “spellbinding” (Vogue), “smoldering” (The Washington Post) novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls. “Under Cline’s command, every sentence as sharp as a scalpel, a woman toeing the line between welcome and unwelcome guest becomes a fully destabilizing force.”—The New York Times “Alex drained her wineglass, then her water glass. The ocean looked calm, a black darker than the sky. A ripple of anxiety made her palms go damp. It seemed suddenly very tenuous to believe that anything would stay hidden, that she could successfully pass from one world to another.” Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome. A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city. With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake. Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline’s The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.
Reviews with the most likes.
Nothing actually happens in this book. It's just the same thing over and over with a toxic and completely unlikeable main character. And then it just ends without resolution in an open ending. I guess you could get something out of this if you're looking for commentary about the human condition, but at no point did this book entertain me.
TWs: Sex with a minor, drug use
4.5 rounded up; It's amazing how much attention a reader can pour into an unlikeable character's story. Alex is a 22 year-old woman who hops places after a misstep with her ‘lover' Simon. She eventually finds a way into multiple people's lives, figuring out how she can use people and manipulate them so that she can shelter with them until Simon's party on Labor Day weekend.
It was a truly gripping read, unsure how Alex was going to act and figure out things as we went along with her story. Her personality was truly manipulative, only caring about her current situation and destination. The most frustrating part for me was Jack, who's a minor ;-; all of her 'errors', only causing Jack trauma and who knows what happened after the ending. It was terribly sad. The ending..!!
The narrator did such a great job, it wrecked me ;-;