As an English student I spend most of the year with a reading list the length of my arm, and can usually be found either with my nose in a book or frantically reading Sparknotes before a tutorial. After handing in all my assignments for the year, I wanted to get back into recreational reading, and I found 'The Girls' by Emma Cline on a trip to Sainsbury's when I was supposed to be buying food. Obviously reading is #super #important so this purchase was completely justified, and I wanted to see whether this book lived up to the hype.
'The Girls' is the debut novel from Californian writer Emma Cline. Released last summer, it has garnered considerable success, landing Cline a two million dollar three-book-deal with Random House. Widely lauded as the 'IT' book of 2016 (I'm late to the party, I know), it has proved rather divisive. Some reviews have criticised Cline's prose style and sensational themes of sexuality and violence, relegating it to the realm of 'girl' orientated genre fiction alongside Gillian Flynn's 'Gone Girl' and Paula Hawkins' 'The Girl on the Train'. This may not be the end of such comparisons as the film rights have been snatched up by Scott Rudin, producer of 'The Social Network' and 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo', so a big budget adaptation may be hitting our screens in the coming years.
When I picked up my copy of 'The Girls', Northern Ireland was experiencing its shortlived bout of June sunshine. This was the perfect backdrop, as I started the novel bathed in the heat of Belfast's Botanic Gardens. One of Cline's greatest strengths is her ability to set a vivid scene, and she immediately plunges the reader into a marijuana-scented Californian summer in the late sixties. I found the prose style to be captivating, and whilst some reviewers have deemed it overwritten in places, I found the phrasing to be fitting to the often melodramatic narrative voice of a 14 year old girl. Cline effectively captures an inherently teenage sense of longing, romanticising even the most mundane activities and wondering what life is like outside the confines of your bedroom, a feeling often exacerbated in the long stretches of summer. The prose was dreamy and indulgent in places, but also sharp and detached, as the novel cleanly shifts narrative voice between adult Evie and her teenage self. For me, it really was a case of being hooked from the first line,
"I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls."
I went into the novel with little knowledge of the plot, and with that in mind, I don't want to give too much away here. If you have done your research, you will no doubt be aware of its premise, but knowing fewer details really intensifies the experience. The story follows the protagonist, Evie Boyd, as she reflects on a summer of her childhood that changed the course of her life. It constantly dances on the threshhold between dreamy romanticism and intoxicating seediness, surreptitiously hinting at darkness around every corner. Evie longs to escape the monotony of her home life and whilst she finds a seemingly Edenic escape, things are not entirely as they seem, and every page is tinged with dread.
"The summer gaped before me - the scatter of days, the march of hours, my mother swanning around the house like a stranger."
A vividly-painted re-imagining of shocking true events, I thoroughly enjoyed 'The Girls', and it left me gripped from the outset. Whilst it is not entirely perfect - the narrative shifts between Evie's adulthood and her youth can be jarring in some places, and the climax of the novel felt slightly too brief - I thought it was a strong debut and a great contemporary read for the summer.
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