It was the summer of '69...
Bewertet mit 4 Sternen
In the hot, dusty and seemingly endless summer of 1969, fourteen-year-old Evie Boyd is confused, insecure and desperate for love and attention. Her parents divorced, her father distant and her mother only concerned about herself, her only friend Connie has abandoned her, Evie seeks contact with the girls that live on a ranch in the hills.
Girls who share everything and don't care about anyone's opinion, so different from Evie. Girls who follow and worship their leader Russell. Soon, Evie is sucked into the group, not knowing that this summer will alter her life forever.
„The Girls“ is not a plot-driven book, rather a character-study about Evie, told in beautiful prose. The events are loosely based on the Manson family and the subsequent murders. But these take up only a small part of the story. The focus lies on Evie, how lonely she feels in the beginning and how she gets sucked into the cult. The mysterious Suzanne becomes a motherlike figure for her but also kind of her love interest.
Alternating to the events in 1969, we meet adult Evie, a traumatized and frightened person, trapped in the events of that summer and share her view of her younger self.
I found the prose of Emma Cline beautiful and with much detail to spike vivid and sunsparkling images in my head.
While I sympathized with the adult Evie, I couldn't relate to young Evie at all. I understood her, but I didn't like her and so I didn't care much what happened to her in the hands of Russell and the others.
All other characters remained distant and mysterious, even Suzanne. That was the most negative aspect of the book for me aside from the fact that I found it so obvious where this was leading from the start and there were no plot twists at all.
The pace of the book matches a long and hazy summer until the end which felt a bit rushed, but that's okay. The kind of open ending matched the story perfectly.