Rating: 5 stars

The Girls is one of those now ubiquitous ‘not-quite-based-on-a-real-crime’ crime stories. I was put off by the name and the fact that it was related to a real crime, and actually that was wrong of me.

Unlike many other books with the word ‘girls’ in the title, this book is indeed about girls (not adult women, e.g. The Girl on the Train, Gone Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). A group of American teenagers, following Evie, a fourteen-year-old not so much taken in by a charismatic cult leader but by one of his many devoted female followers and sexual partners, the seventeen-year-old Suzanne.

The reason this novel worked for me was that it wasn’t so much about just gawping at the crime element (which was an analogue for the Manson Family Sharon Tate murder) but about women, and the pressures that society puts on women, and how women come to learn about their sexuality. I found it engaging, honest, tough reading – in the best way. It was well written, and I tore through it in a couple of days.

It’s not exactly easy reading – definitely worth noting that it contains a lot of sexual assault and, of course, the murder – but it’s a truthful and absorbing look at one atrocity in the context of a world in which women are always caught in a web of competing obligations and expectations. Check it out!

Reviewed by Louise

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