[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.

This is a book about users and the used. Alex, a young call girl is both. Her mental illness and sociopathy are made clear throughout the book. Like a spy she makes her living by thinking on her feet and turning every new situation into an opportunity. Her job is to please and she does so very well until she gets sick of it. She is shown in contrast with other young men and women who continue to devote themselves to pleasing, organizing, anticipating, and caring for their rich masters who can live their lives of excess when all the day-to-day business of living is made smooth and peaceful. Why does Alex sabotage herself at every turn? Why is she so blind to reality? Or is the reader left wondering why all the other servants are so blind to reality that they also don't wreak havoc on their overlords? I didn't fall in love with Alex. I didn't fall in love with anyone in this book, but I couldn't stop reading it. ( )