![]() ![]() In this novel’s mesmerizing opening sentences, she continues: “I noticed their hair first, long and uncombed. One day Evie is in a public park holding a hamburger and, she tells us, “I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls.” This happens slowly, then with disturbing quickness. “The Girls” is about what happens when Evie wanders into the orbit of a Charles Manson-like cult. In the fall, she’ll be shipped, like an item scratched from her mother’s to-do list, to boarding school. With her newly divorced and emotionally brittle mother, Evie lives in an echoing and well-appointed house in Petaluma. Her grandmother was a well-known actress, plucked from obscurity à la Lana Turner. Evie grew up under the Hollywood sign, if only figuratively. Cline’s protagonist is Evie Boyd, a bored and drifting 14-year-old. Cline’s sentences there’s a freight of submerged dread, as if the universe were keyed to the shimmering of the Doors drummer John Densmore’s cymbals. The book is set in Northern California over the agitated summer of 1969, and beneath the rhythm of Ms. Emma Cline’s first novel, “The Girls,” gets off to a quietly thrilling start. ![]()
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