The Girls
by Emma Cline
Summary
In the summer of 1969, fourteen year old Evie Boyd drifts through a lonely stretch of her adolescence in Petaluma, California, unmoored by her parents' recent divorce and a widening distance from her closest friend, Connie. Dumpster diving for food scraps one afternoon, she meets Suzanne, an older girl with an unhurried confidence Evie has never seen up close before, and Suzanne pulls her toward a ranch on the edge of town where a charismatic, failed musician named Russell Hadrick presides over a loosely organized group of young women who cook, clean, and sleep with him in exchange for a sense of belonging none of them can quite name out loud. Evie steals money from her own mother to give to the group, tolerates Russell's coercive attention toward her, and grows increasingly fixated on Suzanne rather than on Russell himself. On the night the group finally acts on Russell's festering resentment toward a famous musician who never got him a record deal, Suzanne, catching Evie watching her with an intensity that unsettles even her, has Evie sent home rather than brought along, a single choice that keeps Evie out of the house where the group murders four people, including a young child. Evie is sent away to boarding school while Suzanne and the others are arrested and become the subject of national infamy. Decades later, an adult Evie, now working as a quiet caretaker in a friend's borrowed house, is confronted by that friend's teenage son and his girlfriend, whose casual curiosity about the famous cult forces Evie to finally sit with a question she has spent her whole adult life avoiding: whether, if Suzanne had let her stay in the car that night, she would have gone inside with the others.
Cline frames a single teenage summer inside a brief present day story, and most of the book's tension comes less from what actually happens at the ranch than from Evie's own hunger to be chosen, to matter to someone as magnetic as Suzanne, a longing the prose renders in dense, sensory detail that some reviewers found genuinely vivid and others found strained, closer to an overworked writing exercise than to plain observation.
Historical Context & Significance
The Girls won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, given to a debut, the same year. It was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the mystery and thriller category, and it was a nominee, though not a winner, for the 2016 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction. Random House paid a reported two million dollar advance after outbidding eleven other publishers, and the book spent three months on the New York Times bestseller list. Kirkus Reviews called it vivid and ambitious while also faulting its fondness for strenuously inventive language.
Cline's ex boyfriend later sued her, alleging she had installed spyware on his computer and plagiarized his unpublished writing into the novel; a federal judge dismissed the copyright claim in 2018, ruling the two works differed significantly in detail and texture. The story draws loosely on the Manson Family murders and the killing of Sharon Tate, though Cline invented her own musician, ranch, and victims rather than retelling the historical case directly.