Retro Review: The Girls
/When I started this blog, I had been posting reviews on Goodreads for about 6 months. In the interest of having all of my book writing in one place, I will post one of these old reviews every Friday. They weren't written with a blog in mind, so please forgive the lack of summary and off-the-cuff tone.
2 stars. This just didn't do it for me. I had really, really high expectations, and that may have been part of the problem, but ultimately it just didn't resonate. My immediate reaction: stylish but empty.
Okay, so I liked that The Girls captures a hugely important aspect of being a teenage girl. For someone so insecure and worried about being judged, Evie judges others harshly - especially men. She's hypercritical; beyond hypercritical, she's full of feral hatred and disgust. And she's struggling, flailing around, grasping at an identity that keeps slipping through her fingers. I remember that; as a teenage girl I had no idea what I was doing ... and I knew it.
And the writing is admirably grotesque, borrowing from Gillian Flynn, but the similes and metaphors are really strange and the language occasionally pretentious (sorry! I used the "p" word!). Cline's words are wild and flashy and strange and impressionistic, but they feel manipulative, like shiny wrapping paper around a mediocre gift. The purpose of this book felt murky.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm missing something. I wanted to like this and I do appreciate it on some level. I'm eager to see what Emma Cline paints next. But this a 2-star experience, for me.