The Girls

If you are the type of person who reads reviews on the library’s website (in other words, if you are smart, interesting, well-read and just generally pretty great), chances are you already know about this book, which made a huge splash as a fiction debut. If you’re like me, the thing you heard about it over and over again was that it’s about a Charles Manson-esque cult, and maybe you thought: pass. Please give The Girls another shot, because it is so much less sensational -- and so much lovelier -- than that description would lead you to believe. There’s no gore here, just a creeping feeling of unease, of someone or something in the shadows, of not knowing yourself as well as you thought. Ignore the cult stuff: this is really more of a book about female adolescence and the intense, consuming relationships that can form amid the piercing loneliness of that period.