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.

Emma Cline is literary genius at its finest. There are lines within this book that are so well written they deserve a second or third read to fully appreciate them.

I found this book fascinating as a character study, specifically a study in the lengths one can go to in deluding oneself. Tension ramps up throughout the narrative, as it becomes increasingly clear that the main character will not get what she wants and at the same time the main character will not give up. I wanted to keep reading to see just how far that tension could stretch before it snapped. My one criticism is that the central premise is nothing new. The idea that the playgrounds of wealthy East Coasters are exclusionary is older than the Great Gatsby. This theme could have been made more nuanced by an examination of how, though Alex will never fully belong in this place, she is able to extend her stay only by virtue of being a young, pretty, white woman.

Life’s a beach, and then the guy you stole $10,000 from is on his way to find you.

WHEW. Where to start with The Guest? Reading it felt like hearing some ominous gossip about an ex-friend from college whose hair you used to hold back while she got acquainted with the toilet bowl. It felt like sipping on an hours-old cocktail you 1. forgot you ordered - the ice has long since melted - and 2. can’t technically afford. It felt like twilight at the beach when you have work the next morning but you’ve been drinking and soaking up UV rays for hours, feeling the combination of sea matter and salt and sweat on your skin, and don’t have a hotel room to take a shower - but you keep drinking anyway.

And that’s really the tone of the novel. After pissing off her wealthy, older paramour before his famed MDW, our anti-hero Alex finds herself adrift in a wealthy beach town, conning her way into shelter and comfort - if only for a night, and at a high cost to those who find themselves in her path.

The grifter vibes here were not immaculate. They were red-eyed, ill-planned, steeped in desperation. I read this book a few weeks ago and it’s still giving me that itchy, uncomfy feeling of watching someone taking a running start to cannonball into disaster - but it’s gorgeously dressed up in Emma Cline’s mesmerizing prose and ability to unspool an abstract feeling into letters and punctuation.

Was it an enjoyable reading experience? No. Should you pick it up? Absolutely. Read to scratch a scam rat fixand for impeccably drawn tension, mid- to high-stakes drama, and to feel better about your own bad decisions, very likely are not as as terrible as Alex’s.

Instantly riveting, exquisitely written, eerily astute. I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about this one as the premise didn't totally jazz me but wow, this was a great read. Having spent some time in the world she writes in, I was blown away by how well she captured it and fascinated by her ability to inhabit this character's inner life. I love when an author lives up to the hype and I look forward to putting this book in the hands of other readers. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the digital arc.

Funny to read this right after Lauren Groff's upcoming novel, which is also about a girl from terrible circumstances fighting to find sustenance and shelter in a harsh world - in this case, the wealthy enclaves of Long Island. It's honestly a pretty grim read; Alex is so desperate, and so doomed, and the people she's trying to find purchase with are so blandly awful. If you liked watching White Lotus you might enjoy it. Not badly written and I read it avidly, but it gave me no joy and left a sad aftertaste.

This book is well written on the line level, very neat and precise, but it is a disaster of a book. Alex is vapid and soulless and has absolutely no depth. I never felt anything for her but disdain, and the ending .was ridiculous. Reading this novel was a complete waste of my time.

In THE GUEST, we meet Alex, a very three dimensional character trying to survive in a one dimensional world of self serving residents in an upscale community. Alex lives her life as a chameleon, changing and adapting to fit into her current surroundings. The story is told in third person and moves quickly from residence to party to residence as Alex "works" the crowd to find someone to care for her, both physically and emotionally. As in her previous titles, Ms Cline has given Alex a depth of character that we can all recognize, vulnerable yet tough, caring but carefree at the same time, I felt sorrow, anger and hopeful for her, a definte testament to Ms Cline's writing skills. THE GUEST is another 5 star title from Emma Cline.

3.5 stars rounded up

When 22-year old Alex is asked to leave her rich ‘boyfriend’s’ summer house on Long Island, she decides to stay around for a few more days until his Labor Day party, but she has no money, an erratically working phone, a pill habit, and nowhere to stay.

LIke many a hero on a quest, Alex meets up with assorted people who help her on her way. Those that she comes across are, like her, disenfranchised from the moneyed house-owning adults; weekend renters, employees, children, and those on the wrong end of power in a relationship. She is unwilling to tell them her real story and uses them all for whatever she can get: food, a room, re-entry to the upper echelon, paying with desultory sex and a willingness to be whatever they want her to be.

There’s not a lot more plot than that but it’s a riveting and ugly portrayal of the wealthy from the view of the underbelly. The self-absorbed men and women are scathingly pictured and seem as empty and staged as the houses they summer in.

Alex herself is something of a void: we know little about her other than some sketched in details of her life in the city, and we see her putting on, often unsuccessfully, a chameleon-like persona to fit in with different circumstances. In some ways, she reminded me of a Bret Easton Ellis character but the author has given her much more to work with in a much more concise setting.

As Alex gets closer to her Labor Day deadline, there is no clear picture of what she thinks she’s going to achieve. Her growing desperation doesn’t let her see beyond that target and as she burns boats with the people who’ve picked her up along the way her future remains opaque.

This is one of those books that I got more out of when I’d finished it and looked back on it. It’s somewhat less immediately engaging than The Girls, the author’s previous novel about a young woman’s experience in a Manson-like cult, but feels like it comes from a more confident and mature writer. If you like books about disengaged young people then this is a good one for you.

Thanks to Random House and Netgalley for the digital review copy.

Good, but in a sort of alien way. It brings to mind some Patricia Highsmith novels where you have a person smoothly and effectively performing insane acts of deception that no rational person would ever do and completely fooling people (if that's even the right term for it) because their behavior is so outside the norm of what one might expect. It puts you a little at arm's length as the reader because the main character's worldview is so unhinged at times, but hey, there are worse people to be reminiscent of than Patricia Highsmith.

The Guest is a compulsive slice-of-life as we follow young grifter Alex as she quickly goes through a series of different characters trying to find a new place to stay after her sugar daddy breaks up with her. such an intriguing premise and Cline’s treatment of a semi-unlikeable character like Alex is written so well. I was completely fascinated seeing where she would turn up next, and Cline writes her with just enough draw so the reader actually cares about where she ends up.

I found this book intense. I can’t imagine living the life of a grifter- not for me. Alex bounces from person to person place to place adjusting her personality to take advantage where she can. Set in an idyllic location over the course of a few days. It will leave you to wonder who is really using who??

This is a story about survival.  Alex, 22 years old, has finally found a measure of security living with an older man, Simon, at his beautiful home on the East End of Long Island.  Simon knows little about Alex or her background -- by her design.  She does her best to fit seamlessly and unobtrusively into his life.  But after an uncharacteristic incident at one of the many parties the two attend together where Alex does what she wants instead of what Simon expects, Simon sends Alex away with nothing more than a ride to the local train station by his house manager and a ticket back to the city.  

Alex is adrift, not least of all because she has nowhere to return to in the city after a series of incidents make it impossible for her to go back to any part of her old life.  So Alex stays on Long Island, determined to make it to Labor Day when she plans to reappear at Simon's house for his annual party and hopefully regain his favor.  Over the course of several days, with only the clothes in her beach bag and a phone that barely works, she finds a way to survive by using her greatest talent -- understanding what others want and molding herself to meet their needs.  As she slips in and out of people's lives and takes what she needs to get through the day, her efforts at her own survival often leave those who find themselves in her wake worse off and not quite understanding what happened to them.

This was an intriguing novel.  As a reader, you feel like you are in Alex's head, as she is making the constant compromises and justifications necessary, in her mind, to survive, and convincing herself of her own shifting narrative.  In Alex's relationships with each of the people she relies on for survival, she both shape shifts to become what they want -- sharing just enough for them to reach the conclusions she and they want -- and maintains a core commitment to her own self.  And, as a result, we see how far people will go to convince themselves of what they want to see in a person -- whether about their own selves or others in their lives.

Strongly recommended!

I am struggling with where to start this review because I don’t really understand what I read. I initially requested this book on NetGalley because I enjoyed The Girls by this author enough to be curious about this one.

This book follows Alex, a character that I just did not like at all and didn’t really find to be that interesting as she was just very manipulative and used everyone. This book is largely just her wandering around a wealthy area after being kicked out of her rich boyfriend’s home. You are largely inside this character’s head and not a lot happens. This one took me a while to get through because I was just really bored with her musings which became very repetitive and all of the other characters that she meets are so flat and not well developed.

This is one of the few instances where I am just kind of at a loss of what the author was trying to convey or even what the point of this story was. I kept thinking maybe this was leading to something interesting, but the book just suddenly ends. So I am left feeling very frustrated on this one. I think if this had not been an arc that I requested, I probably would have DNF’d fairly early on.

I could not finish enough of this book to be able to leave a comprehensive review, but I hope it finds its audience and I am grateful to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an advance copy.