After reading solely children's and YA books the past couple months in preparation for a workshop, I was beyond excited to finally delve into an adult read, and The Girls was first on my list. The first sentence had me so excited. "I looked up because of the laughter, and kept looking because of the girls." YES. This wasn't a book about middle-schoolers trying to figure out emotions and stuff! Freedom!! 
 It all went downhill not long after that. Little did I know I was going to be stuck with a teenager trying to figure out her emotions and stuff for 300+ pages. 
 My biggest problem with The Girls was the writing. Cline's apparently extensive vocabulary comes off as awkward and confusing. A lot of her writing feels like she was trying to insert as many weird synonyms from a thesaurus as she could. The similes and metaphors were forced and flowery and had me zoning in and out constantly. I think Cline could be good with an editor who is willing to tell her to cut back and maybe think about writing in complete sentences. I'm sorry, but I don't care how creative she was trying to be with the choppy fragments - it was jarring and annoying. 
 Then there's the plot itself, which is barely even there. The whole book is a monotonous drag sprinkled with a few disturbing sex scenes along with a ton of other sexual references that seemed to be thrown in just for the sake of being racy. All the men are painted as sleezeballs and all the women are painted as lost and sad. The whole book just felt tired and forced. As my sister pointed out, who knew a book modeled after the incredibly messed up but fascinating Manson Family could be so boring? 
 To sum it all up: After realizing about 20 pages in that I really didn't like the book, it was painful to slog through the rest (the things I do for book club!).I gave it 2 stars because I did find myself nervous and somewhat invested by the time the big event occurred. I just had to read way too many sentence fragments to get there.