The Girls

Emma Cline 2016

Devastation Rating

Emotionally Ruined
trauma loss literary fiction mental health

Our Take

A fourteen-year-old girl is drawn into a California cult in the 1960s through the gravitational pull of older girls who seem to offer something she cannot name. Cline writes the cult through female desire and loneliness rather than doctrine, and the adult narrator's retrospective ache is the novel's truest register.

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