The Girls by Emma Cline.
This came highly recommended. It is a basic retelling of the Charles Manson murders, albeit fictionalized and slightly changed.
I somehow was first introduced to Charles Manson on Dateline sometime in the 1990s. He scared the dickens out of me. Still does.
But of course it wasn't really about him. It was about his followers, those girls who had done his killing, and who smiled through their trials with nary a thought to the people that they had murdered.
It is those girls, now grown into women the age of my mother, who have become model prisoners, who have obtained degrees and mentored others in the prison system and who all claim to be remorseful, who claim to have been brainwashed by a madman, and who want nothing more than a life outside a prison wall for the last few decades of their life. This was denied just two days ago to Leslie Van Houten despite recommendation by the parole board to allow her her freedom, as California Governor Jerry Brown declared her a danger to society.
This novel imagines the life of those girls, and of one in particular who is at the edges of the fuss, but still intrigued by their smiles, their purpose, their seeming happiness.
It's one of those books that you don't really see the genius of until it is completely finished and you set it aside and realize what world you just emerged from.
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