I just finished 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗚𝗨𝗘𝗦𝗧 by Emma Cline and I’m left with one big question, “What???” Now don’t get me wrong, I didn’t dislike this book, but I definitely wasn’t overwhelmed by it either. It’s the story of Alex, a 22-year old woman who’s lived for the last few years as a sort of grifter/sex worker. She’s just barely supported her existence by sleeping with, and often stealing from, older men. She makes them feel good about themselves and they buy her things while looking the other way.⁣⁣
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That all works fine, until she takes from the wrong man and goes too far with another. Suddenly, Alex is dismissed by one and desperately trying to avoid the other. For a week, Alex has nowhere to go, so wanders from place to place, man to man, trying to find somewhere to land even for a short time. She believes she’ll return to her former lover’s good graces with a little time. That’s it. That’s the story. We follow Alex as she wanders through her own life, making a mess of it time after time.⁣⁣
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To me the story was sad. Alex never stopped hunting for a man to solve her problems. Most any woman could have told her that wasn’t going to work, but that never happened. At the end of the week, Alex was where she wanted to be, but all her problems came right along with her, leaving me to wonder about the point. It’s why my rating is just okay despite the high quality writing and a story that kept me engaged throughout. Cline did some interesting things in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘎𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵, making it well worth reading. Just don’t expect any big resolution. ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫⁣⁣
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🦋 BTW, I wasn't walking around carrying a blue boa and a cheap pearl bracelet. They just happened to be looped over a fence post along the walk I took with this book in hand...serendipity! ⁣⁣
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Thanks to @RandomHouse for ARCs of #TheGuest.

Cline always manages to strike a tone, a charge, a promise that feels elliptical, gauzy and immediate all at once. Love me a gross, disaffected, sour heroine grifter, who has never felt the burden of lacking because she was born with it. vicious and indolent, like sunstroke.

Alex is a top tier manipulator who finds herself playing the role of the younger housewife to the older, rich man. After years of escorting in the city, she's been whisked away to the suburbs just when her life started to spiral down because things Just Work Out for her. But when things stop working, she loses her game and continuously miscalculates, leading her to make riskier and more frustrating decisions with each passing day.

This is a hot girl book. I love an unlikable main character, I love unreliable narration, and I love having no idea what's coming next. Alex made the worst, most anxiety-inducing decisions and I was rooting so hard for her. This book physically made my heart beat faster from anxiety and frustration. The ending was jarring, but I agree it was the right choice after sitting with it. The writing is also so tight and well-paced.

I‘m just not sure about this one. The MC and her point of view was unusual and compelling but also kind of awful. The story felt both too short and too long; might have been better as a short story? Cline is a great writer, the pace and structure is solid, the character development just fell short for me.

Alex is a young woman drifting through life, getting involved with men she doesn't love in order to get her needs met. When she angers her current paramour and he kicks her out, she goes in search of her next target. It was a very difficult book to put down because I wanted to see where Alex would wind up next. She's not entirely a sympathetic character, but I still wanted her to work things out.

Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for the advanced reader's copy that I received in exchange for an honest review.

In Emma Cline’s novel, The Guest, it’s August, and Alex, a young sex worker, is spending the summer in the Hamptons as a guest of a wealthy man in his 50s, Simon. Alex met Simon in a New York bar just as she hit rock bottom. She was behind on her rent, and her roommates want to throw her out. Business hasn’t been great lately, and Alex has “dropped her rates, then dropped them again.” She’s “no longer welcome in ” various hotel bars and restaurants for charging items to former client accounts, and “too many of her usuals” stopped calling. With business down, Alex became “lax with her usual screening policies,” and was “ripped off more than once.” Spiraling downwards with increasing desperation, she reconnects with a client named Dom, a volatile violent man. Alex, who steals whenever an opportunity presents itself, steals from Dom.

So Alex, at rock bottom, thinks Simon “swooped in to save the day.” When they meet at a bar, with her very practiced act, she imagines he thinks she’s just a “normal” girl,” and that he buys her coy, shy girl act, so when Simon invites Alex to his splendid home in the Hamptons for the month of August, she can’t believe her luck. At first everything goes well. She spends days at the beach swimming, and she attends various social events with Simon. He buys her many expensive designer gifts, and is Simon’s Barbie doll. Giving blow jobs on demand and “offer[ing] up no friction whatsoever.”

And wasn’t it better to give people what they wanted? A conversation performed as a smooth transaction–a silky back-and-forth without the interruption of reality. Most everyone preferred the story. Alex learned how to provide it, how to draw people in with a vision of themselves, unrecognizable but turned up ten degrees, amplified into something better. […] Alex had imagined what kind of person Simon would like, and that was the person Alex told him she was.

So here is Alex spending her days lounging on the beach and at Simon’s home, she lives in luxury, waited upon by his employees, and the most incredible meals are prepared for her. While it is, no doubt, not easy being someone’s sex toy who apparently has no desires, opinions or tastes of her own, this is Alex’s profession. So here’s a luxury holiday (with strings) handed to her on a plate, but there’s some little part of her character that cannot sustain the role. Perhaps it’s the boredom. Perhaps it’s a self-destructive streak.

When she horribly embarrasses Simon at a party, Alex finds herself rapidly kicked out of Paradise. With very little money, a dying cell phone, an angry Dom looking for her, and no place to stay, Alex grifts her way through the Hamptons, hoping to make it to Labour Day when she can crash Simon’s party, confident he will forgive her.

Alex is a credible creation. Self destructive, she trashes relationships and then thinks people will be charmed into one more favour–they’re not. She never gets over the idea that she’s special. Simon, I suspect, knows from the onset that Alex is a sex worker. She may think she’s giving him an ingenue story that he’s naive enough to believe, but perhaps Simon’s seeming acceptance of the story allows him to circumvent that grubby discussion of money. It’s highly likely that Simon has a string of girls just like Alex. They are easily replaceable.

As Alex grifts her way through the Hamptons, lying and charming her way through favours, she meets a range of characters including Nicholas, an assistant/caretaker who spends an evening with Alex, much to his regret, a child who is Alex’s ticket into an exclusive members-only club (free food and drinks) and a young man with mental health issues. As the days pass in the Hamptons, we see the underbelly of this ultra-wealthy area–the gigolo husband whose boredom can’t compensate for a plush life, employees who act like automatons until their employers aren’t looking, wealthy residents who employ security to clear away trespassing vacationers like bits of trash, and holidaymakers who have their own version of the Hampton’s experience.

We see the vast gap between the Haves and the Have-nots, the Shangri-La estates of the ultra-rich which create a sort of unreality for those who long to be included, and the alienation of Alex, who longs to belong once more. There’s a totem pole here–Alex at first has a good position, albeit temporary, but as she slides down that pole, the ‘respect’ employees used towards her slips. Alex is a user, but she is also used. Basically homeless, and carrying around one bag of increasingly stained and creased designer clothing, it becomes harder and harder to keep up the charade that she belongs with the ultra-rich set.

Harrowing in its clear-eyed view of Alex’s descent and her own inability to recognize that she has little to parlay, this incredible book makes my Best-Of-Year list.

Alex could just go up to one of the men. Approach a table with only a few men hunched over their watery cocktails, a manageable audience. Easy enough. You waved your fingers, you spoke in a voice just a tick too quiet–they got flustered, trying to follow what was happening. Any glitch in the usual order of things, the expected social script, made people anxious, off balance. Even a glancing touch at their elbow, the barest squeeze of an arm, could short-circuit any wariness. Suddenly they were newly suggestible, eager to find steady footing in whatever story you offered.

And men did not, it turned out, mind being approached by a young woman–not usually anyway. They did not immediately assume that her motives might be murky, their vanity allowing for the possibility that she had been drawn over by the sheer force of their personhood. But not really sensible to try that here. The air was too domestic, dripping with the proximity of family and other blunt moral concerns. It had a chilling effect; the wives nearby, the children.

Review copy

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the advanced reader copy.

This week’s headline? Life’s a beach

Why this book? I loved The Girls

Which book format? ARC

Primary reading environment? Here and there

Any preconceived notions? I’ll most likely love this book

Identify most with? Alex (I’m horrible 😂)

Three little words? “textures and habits”
Goes well with? Sugar daddies, bikinis

Recommend this to? People who love a sketchy main character

Other cultural accompaniments: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/09/the-guest-by-emma-cline-review-strange-depths-arresting-originality-the-girls

I leave you with this: “All Alex’s unsavory history excised until it started to seem, even to her, like none of it had ever happened.”

“The truth was that the world they were imagining would never include them.”

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Do I know myself or do I know myself? I did, in fact, love this novel.

Alex is a twenty-something escort who hooks up with Simon, a “professionally healthy” fifty-something, at the beach, all the while avoiding her life in the city and the chaos she left behind. She’s something of an unpracticed manipulator, meaning she’s good at getting what she wants from people for a time but has enough sense to get out before they’ve finally had enough of her shit.

Although it’s been a while since I’ve read her first novel, I’d say Cline’s writing has evolved in that it’s not clear where this is going because there’s more to it than what’s at face value, which is a young woman compulsively grifting her way through life.

Definitely recommend it if you're looking for a short novel with a literary spin with some interesting twists along the way!

The Guest is available now.

This book is a ride! I started this and only stood up to refill my glass of water - it’s that too. Cline writes in a way that holds tension from the first few pages until the last page and had me visibly cringing at the awkward choices the main character, Alex, makes. An unlikeable character, I never stopped rooting for her. Great writing! How did Emma Cline do this? Reading it was like watching a pot of water on the stove go from simmering to boiling hoping it doesn’t boil over the top. Crazy good. Thanks to Random House for the copy. Loved it.

I have mixed feelings about this book. One one hand, I enjoyed the writing and it kept me interested, on the other hand, I kind of felt like it was building, building and then nothing. I think the ending is kind of left to up to each reader to decide.

This book felt like it was always just on the edge of becoming something. But then it never did. Just a young woman trying, kind of, to get to a place where she wouldn’t have to try. It was a lot of drama but not a lot of plot. I was hoping that something would happen. I can do character driven if the character develops. I was just bored and started speed reading.

I read this book while peeking through my fingers which were in front of my eyes. It is like a car crash you are watching in slow motion. Alex is on the one hand such an awful person, and yet she has no one to turn to and no where to go, so I fluctuated between between being horrified by her and rooting for her. I was hooked from the first paragraph.

The epitome of a book where the main character is a delusional mess. We follow Alex around for a week as she works her way into stranger’s lives, finding places to crash as she works on her big plan to win back a man she’s not all that fond of anyway.

Both of these things don’t bother me, but this book is definitely not going to be for everyone. There’s very little resolution in the end - it’s really just a snapshot of a quick point in time. If you want to go in a messy, weeklong journey, then pick this one up.

Emma Cline's second novel is as spellbinding as her first. There is such a haunting quality to her writing, and, like the protagonist of "The Girls", Alex is a compelling main character with a tumultuous inner life. I loved the plot, attention to setting and detail, as well as the subtlety of some of the characters' interactions. At this point, I'd be happy reading Cline's grocery list.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House for gifting me a digital ARC of the new book by Emma Cline - 4.5 stars!

Alex is a grifter and desperate to get out of the city, where her roommates have asked her to leave and someone is hunting for her to get back what she took from him. The offer to spend August in the Hamptons with Simon, an older man wanting an easy companion, will perfectly fit the bill. Until he tells her to leave. Alex is sure that with a little bit of time and space, he'll welcome her back and plans to show up at his annual Labor Day party. She just has to survive the week until then.

Alex is one of those characters that will have you rooting for her, even while you don't agree with her behavior. Cline's writing is once again top notch as we watch Alex flit and flitter in and out of strangers' lives, sometimes helping them but mostly causing them more issues, as she does whatever she needs to do to bide her time. This is all character development and the ending is left open to interpretation, which seems a fitting end to Alex's personality.

I'm on a roll here; 2 books in a row that I didn't like for the same reason. They both took too long to get to where they were going and the overall experience was a feeling of time wasted. So many good books out there and I wasted my time on this and the other.
Basically this is the story of a call girl (do they still use this title?) who went from one man to the next, but not exactly as a happy camper. Simon kicks her out and she drifts along, mooching off others until she can work her way back to him. The men, the drugs, the dreariness was too much. Not for me.
Thank you NetGalley for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest opinion,

The Girls is one of my favorite books of all time and I was so excited to read Emma Cline's latest novel. While it was a fun read, I found most of it unbelievable and, ultimately, it fell flat for me.

The Guest is Emma Cline’s highly anticipated and unforgettable latest novel. Following 22 year old main character Alex’s messy faux pas at a party with the older man she’d been staying with, she finds herself manipulating everyone she comes into contact with for survival leaving a ridiculously entertaining trail of chaos behind her on Long Island. Highly recommended for fans of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Boy Parts, Gone Girl and Less Than Zero. A new favorite and a strong contender for best release of 2023, I urge you to get your hands on it. Thank you so much to NetGalley and Random House for the e-ARC!

The guest is by breakout author Emma cline, a publishing sensation in 2016 for her Manson-era novel the girls. The guest tonally had a lot of similarities-the concise dialogue-the sense of isolation and characters who sort of wander. Alex is a sex worker in nyc who ends up involved with an older gentleman who takes her into his home and life in the Hamptons for a summer. By the end of the summer, Simon tells Alex to go back to nyc and kicks her out. Alex spends the night week infiltrating the wealthy in the Hamptons, and wrecking their lives on her quest back to Simon. The novel is sparse and there isn’t much divulged about Alex’s past. Alex aimlessly drifts around the Hamptons crowd, idling killing time, but cline withholds information about her from the reader as well-creating this drifter persona. If you are looking for a book heavy on plot-this isn’t it. If you are looking for a slow burning character study that has an underlying tension -this is the read for you.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing the arc from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

this book was WILD.
all throughout we follow alex who since having been thrown out by her much older boyfriend floats around a beachside community on long island. now found in a place far from where she belongs we experience how alex pretends to be someone she isn’t to be able to stay there; away from the city where her past is waiting for her.

despite this being a darker themed book with a main character who many might see as unlikable, emma cline was able to make me root for alex and wish for the best for her in all the anxiety inducing situations she faced.

a perfect (summer) read with beautiful scenery, engaging writing, and a young woman who continuously makes wild, crazy, and often very questionable decisions.

the publisher kindly provided this arc through netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was a great literary thriller. Alex is really hard to root for but for me it was impossible NOT to be rooting for her. The sense of suspense and looming dread was masterfully done. Alex's poor choices, poor judgement, and naivete made her sympathetic and infuriating at the same time. It's frustrating that you see she really has no way out of her situation. The reader can see how much she is fooling herself that everything will just be okay. The atmosphere and setting are beautifully rendered. I thought the narrative pacing lagged in a few sections and I was a little bit frustrated by the ending, although I think that'll be a matter of personal preferences. I would have liked Alex to have learned something over the course of the week, and for us to see the results of that. But overall I enjoyed it quite a bit. This was my first of Cline's books and I'll be interested to go back and read The Girls.