Emma Cline is all about the vibes and never about the plot, and I love her for that ( )

[b:The Guest|61986136|The Guest|Emma Cline|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1666574413l/61986136._SY75_.jpg|55018560] by Emma Cline was a disappointing book with an unresolved ending after following the disaffected main character through the seductive Long Island landscape and many pages. Mesmerizing enough to keep me plodding on to see how she finagles yet another man and maintains her optimism that her lover will take her back, but not satisfying, in the end, despite the effort of the author. Cline's other book, [b:The Girls|26889925|The Girls|Emma Cline|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1453058712l/26889925._SY75_.jpg|42856015], was much more appealing to me in plot and writing. ( )

Burned through… but dislike ending. No ending. ( )

Always a treat to read an Emma Cline book. I love The Girls very much. Cline writes so well, so frighteningly well, about white American girlhood, about the hunger for attention ingrained in girls that gives way in her stories to a moral unmooring, a need that outstrips all else. Always it’s impossible to dismiss the characters as perpetrators and always it’s impossible to accept them as victims. There is a real troubling murk that Cline can conjour better than anyone else.

This book was less riveting to me. It hung too much on the party at the end of the week she just had to get to. It hung way too much. The episodes in which the protag conned various upper crust dupes into doing her bidding started to feel predictable and repetitious. Lots of reviews and Tik Tok videos made a lot of the ending but it felt like too little too late to me. Of course all of these choices could be read as thematically pointed but that feels like a cop out to me. But that mood, that sense of girlhood forked out and snapped on its own supply—nobody does it like Cline. ( )

Great writing: sharp, deft sentences.