Though someone would now pay a social price for referring to hostesses, coeds, or members of the steno pool as “girls”—that’s “women”—the noun is enjoying a literary revival. Following the success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, and The Girl on the Train, recent or upcoming titles include Girl About Town, Beware That Girl, The Second Girl, The Lost Girls, The Girl in the Ice, Nowhere Girl, Sarong Party Girls, Girl in the Shadows, and Girls on Fire; as well as Good Girl, Good Girls, and The Good Girls; and Girl in the Blue Coat, not to mention The Girl in the Red Coat. Now we have The Girls, which arrives on a critical hallelujah chorus and carries a blurb from Lena Dunham, the creator of the television program Girls.1
The protagonist of Emma Cline’s first novel is, technically, a girl who has become an old lady. In the present, Evie Boyd recalls her experiences of longing and desire in California in 1969. Bored by her privileged upbringing, alienated from her friends and divorced parents, and afflicted with adolescent doominess, she gets her groove back with a little help from—you guessed it—the girls.
A coming-of-age killing spree.
They are young women in the company of a thinly fictionalized Charles Manson surrogate, called Russell, and the girls seem to Evie, though
