But following her, in flashbacks, from suburban banality to the brink of unspeakable violence, is gripping.įor fourteen-year-old Evie, the summer of 1969 - an “endless, formless summer” - is her last at home in a sleepy San Francisco suburb before being shipped off to boarding school. Suspense isn’t a key element - we first meet Evie Boyd nearly fifty years after the crimes that made the cult famous, and we know that she has escaped essentially unscathed. The book - which garnered a media frenzy of its own when Random House offered Cline a $2 million advance after a heated bidding war - follows a lonely teenager as she gets caught up in a thinly fictionalized version of the Manson cult. That question is central to The Girls, the deeply disquieting debut novel from Emma Cline ’13SOA. How could they have been led so far astray? America watched in horror: these women could have been their daughters, their sisters, their neighbors. Lithe, fresh-faced, and shiny-haired, the girls - all in their early twenties - giggled and held hands as they were led into the courtroom, like they were off to a slumber party instead of death row. But when Manson and his cult of followers went on trial in June 1970 for the gruesome murders of seven people, the most haunting image in the media was not of Manson himself but of his three codefendants: Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Susan Atkins. Few criminals have captured the public imagination like deranged killer Charles Manson.
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