Straight off the bat, I'll tell you that I have a slight obsession with anything based on serial killers - for example, I absolutely loved watching the series Dexter when I first discovered that on Netflix.
One of my Sisters (I have 3, pray for my parents) gave me this book for Christmas, and although I'd not heard of it before I was really excited to get into it. The blurb reads as follows:
"If you're lost, they'll find you...
Evie Boyd is fourteen and desperate to be noticed. It's 1969 and everywhere the heat of a Californian summer beats down and restless, empty days stretch ahead.
Until she sees them. The girls. Hair long and uncombed, jewelry catching the sun. A scattering of young women who are everything she is not, each utterly sure and at one with everything seemingly beyond Evie’s reach. And at their centre, Suzanne, black-haired and beautiful.
Willingly, she begins to drop into their tranquilised circle, oblivious of the danger that sits so cruelly at its centre. If not for Suzanne, she might not have gone. But, intoxicated by her and the life she promises, Evie follows the girls back to the decaying ranch where they live.
Was there a warning? A sign of what was coming? Or did Evie know already that there was no way back?"
It didn't take much research to find out that the book is actually somewhat based on the Manson Family, who I'll admit, I didn't know too much about - only that Charles Manson, the
If I'm honest, I found this book really difficult to get into, the first few pages had me so confused - each paragraph would switch without warning from present-day Evie, to 1969 14 year old Evie. Once I got over that, I realised that the first 30 pages or so seemed like Emma Cline had taken a thesaurus and replaced every other word with the most bizarre synonym possible, or tried to combine several sentences together which I found irritating. For example:
"Everyone was healthy, tan, and heavy with decoration, and if you weren't, that was a thing too-you could be some moon creature, chiffon over lamp shades, on a kitchari cleanse that stained all your dishes with turmeric."
It just seemed slightly too forced and overwritten at times, though definitely more in the first 30 or so pages than in the rest of the book.
Had it not been for my Sister asking me when we spoke on the phone, "How's the book going?", I really don't think I would have finished it, but having pushed and struggled through that first section, I ended up really enjoying the story. At first it put almost a desirable and unexpected* twist on the life of the Manson Family, and from Evie's narration you can almost understand why the girls were sucked in by Manson and his way of life. It's the kind of book that left my brain pleasantly frazzled when it finished, and it took me a few hours to get out of Evie's head.
Overall, I'm giving it a 4/5 and most likely will read again. I'm still mad about some of the ridiculous 2-for-1 sentences but I'll totally forgive Emma seeing as it was her first published novel (and in comparison, lets not forget I got an 'E' in English Lit/Lang).
That's all x
*Way more lesbian sex than I expected in a book revolving around a 14 year old girl.
