Fourteen-year-old Evie Boyd first spies the group of girls in the park, digging through the trash cans for food. The most striking of them: Suzanne, with her dark hair and almost feral smile.
A few days later, Evie, fresh from an argument with her mother, runs into Suzanne again. Suzanne invites Evie back to the farm, and Evie, desperate for friendship and attention, says yes.
The farm, as Evie finds out, is a sort of camp for the lost, kids her age and younger milling about in tattered clothes, older men flashing her smiles. They eat grubby food stolen from trash bins, share clothes that smell of mice, and sleep on sand-dusted mattresses, but for the first time, Evie has a place. She doesn't care about these small disgusts because she feel wanted and loved.
The leader, Russell, is kind and charismatic, preaching love and a communal spirit, and though Evie returns home once in a while to keep her mother from worrying, she falls deeper and deeper into the group's dynamic, propelled by her attraction to Suzanne and desire to belong.
When Russell's relationship with a famous artist goes sour though, the group turns even darker, and Evie is drawn into an ever darkening circle of violence.
Caught between the California of early Lana Del Rey songs, Lolita, and Charles Manson, The Girls feels mostly like a mood novel, dropping the reader into a sun-baked, lazy haze where every action is coated in spiked meaning and depression. Evie's observations have the clarity and insight that only teen girls seem to have, hyper-aware of her own flaws and the insecurities of the women around her.
Cline's writing here is punctuated with sharp, clear images, but they often stick out within the glut of the text, as if Cline wanted to include an image just because she liked it, regardless of its actual import on plot and character. Because of this, the novel is about 350 pages and it doesn't need to be. Evie's own insecurity, her brutal judgement of others, and the constant battering of women, while true to life, compounded into a wholly depressing read.
I expected there to be some redemption or triumph of female relationships and friendships, but instead I got the constant tearing down of females, from men and also women characters. I think Cline meant to show the extent of the hardships women face, but there weren't any positive aspects to balance this out.
The one thing I think Cline really excelled at was fleshing out the psychology of cults and their followers, the warning signs that are ignored, the various reasons why people stay in them, the strongest being, of course, love.
5/10 📕