Summary

The Girls tells the story of 14-year-old Evie Boyd and her involvement with a fictional commune, based on the real-life Manson Family, in the summer of 1969.

In the opening chapter, “I looked up…”, the narrator Evie Boyd reflects on the first moment she encountered the eponymous girls of the novel’s title. She watched the three women walking through a park in her hometown and became immediately fascinated by them, even as other people in the park were disturbed by them. This recollection precedes the beginning of “Part One.”

Part One opens with the chapter “It begins with…” in which Evie recalls some of the details of the gruesome murders carried out by the girls she saw in the park when she was 14 in 1969. In the present day, Evie is a middle-aged woman staying in the vacation home of her friend...