The Girls in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Aug 22, 2016 Renata rated it liked it

Shelves: grownup, historical-fiction, fiction

I'd read really mixed reviews of this but I'm interested in cults (...fictionally speaking) so I checked it out. I...agree with mixed reviews? It's a great idea and there are some beautifully observed lines about ~the patriarchy~ and how much sense it makes for all these girls to be competing for a male cult leader's affections. (“I waited to be told what was good about me. [...] All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until some ...more

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Jul 16, 2016 Jessica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle

The Girls is one of the big buzz books of 2016, and I can see why - I read it over just two days because I couldn't put it down. Based loosely on the Manson Family murders, it's atmospheric and creepy, the story of a teenage girl falling in with the members of a cult one aimless summer and very nearly ending up going along with them on the night they commit a gruesome mass murder. While most of the book is about that summer, parts of it are told from Evie's perspective as an older woman, looking ...more

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Jul 06, 2018 Martin rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2018books

It feels a little perverse to so unequivocally love a book filled with so much gruesome misery: cults, coercive sex, oh and oh yeah mass murder. (Not to mention the larger-scale and more incorporeal miseries like: loneliness, social pressures, and the systematic disempowerment of women.) But this book, with all its unsavory subject matter, was filled with so many sad, beautiful observations, and stunning, keen insights that it was ultimately impossible not to love.

A 14-year-old in 1969 slowly fi ...more

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Oct 04, 2016 Ryan rated it really liked it

Shelves: borrowed, 2016

In my younger and more foolish days, I would have bailed-out of this book by page 75. It feels like we spend a long time getting to know Evie before the plot gets any thrust...but of course, once it does, we care about her that. much. more.

The last 100 pages repay the goodwill of the first 100 ten fold.

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