The Girls (Cline) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Ms. Cline also understands—at the start, at any rate—how to build layers of suspense by withholding information.... [But she] can’t come close to sustaining her novel’s early momentum.... The storytelling becomes vague and inchoate, as if you are reading a poem...about the novel you’d rather be consuming.... It’s not that Ms. Cline doesn’t possess obvious talent. She has an intuitive feel for...how young women move through the world, except when she tells instead of shows. Then her book simply collapses.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


The Girls is a seductive and arresting coming-of-age story, told in sentences at times so finely wrought they could almost be worn as jewelry…a spellbinding story. Cline gorgeously maps the topography of one loneliness-ravaged adolescent heart. She gives us the fictional truth of a girl chasing danger beyond her comprehension, in a summer of Longing and Loss.
Dylan Landis - New York Times Book Review


The Girls is an extraordinary act of restraint. With the maturity of a writer twice her age, Cline has written a wise novel that’s never showy: a quiet, seething confession of yearning and terror…. Debut novels like this are rare, indeed.
Washington Post


Finely intelligent, often superbly written, with flashingly brilliant sentences.At her frequent best, Cline sees the world exactly and generously. On every other page, it seems, there is something remarkable—an immaculate phrase, a boldly modifying adverb, a metaphor or simile that makes a sudden, electric connection between its poles….Much of this has to do with Cline’s ability to look again, like a painter, and see (or sense) things better than most of us do.
The New Yorker


(Starred review.) [P]rovocative, wonderfully written.... Cline is especially perceptive about... the difficult, sometimes destructive passages to adulthood.... The Girls is less about one night of violence than about the harm we can do, to ourselves and others, in our hunger for belonging and acceptance.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [I]impressive...a harrowing coming-of-age exploration of how far a young girl will go (and how much she will give up of herself) in her desperate quest to belong. Beautifully written and unforgettable. —Wilda Williams
Library Journal


Cline makes old news fresh, but [her] MFA's fondness for strenuously inventive language: ...."The words slit with scientific desire..." [is] more baffling than illuminating. And Evie's conclusion that patriarchal culture might turn any girl deadly feels...less [true] upon reflection.... Vivid and ambitious.
Kirkus Reviews