I delved into this novel knowing about the Manson angle, and was wonderfully surprised by the story of Evie Boyd, both as a 14-year-old navigating what lays next in her future and as an older woman reflecting on that younger self. The inner workings of Evie felt all too true as her teenage self; Cline writes her so well. There was something 'quiet' about the way this was written that I thoroughly loved, even though murder and sex and cults were all present. Cline painted a portrait that muted the horror and focused on the girl caught up in it, and what happened to her. Her observations about girlhood throughout the novel also kept me hooked. I'm looking forward to more from Cline.

While reading I was sometimes reminded of Phoebe Gloeckner's The Diary of a Teenage Girl, though their tones are so incredibly different. They just feel like two works that really capture what being a teenage girl is like (and, I suppose, they both are set in the late '60s/70s).