Thank you to Random House Publishing Group and Emma Cline for the opportunity to read "The Guest" prior to its release on May 16, 2023.

After reading and loving "The Girls" by Emma Cline, I knew I had to delve into her latest. "The Guest" follows 22-year-old Alex, an escort who is finally secure with an older gentleman before having her comfort ripped out from beneath her. It shares her story of survival in a different sense, using her various manipulative skills to last six days on her own before her life goes back to normal.

The writing was phenomenal, per usual, and Cline is a writer who doesn't follow a specific plot, which made the novel far more interesting. However, the lack of plot caused the story to jump all around during the initial. While keeping readers on their toes, it also doesn't have any plot device to stick to, causing some confusion and frustration with where the story is actually going.

Alex is a character that can be both loved and hated, which is why I wished we knew more about her past to help understand her actions throughout the novel, including the need to rely on petty theft and sex to get what she is seeking. Which, in truth, we also don't know. Is it validation? Is it comfort? Is it being cared for? Those questions never get answered, leading Alex to be such a enigma of a character, both likeable and unlikeable in the same breath.

From the undeniably talented Emma Cline – author of the unflinching works The Girls and Daddy - comes a new masterpiece sure to please fans of the domestic, slow-burn style which make Cline the icon she is. The Guest features Alex, instantly recognizable as a perpetual wanderer with an uncanny ability to attract older, richer, and outwardly classier men. A main character perhaps exceeded in flatness only by Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, Alex can make her way into – and out of – almost any space. But where and with whom does she truly belong? And at what price will this pivotal question be answered? Emma Cline’s The Guest is an unquestionable must-read.

I was so eager to read The Guest by Emma Cline, after loving Cline's 2016 novel, The Girls, which was loosely based on the Manson family, as well as her short stories. The Guest tells the story of Alex, a 22-year-old woman living with a much older man, until he breaks up with her, leaving her without a house, money, or support.

There are a lot of big topics in The Guest by Emma Cline that go unnamed, like mental illness, addiction, and sex work. Just like in The Girls, Cline’s writing is the propelling force. But in this case, the story is not a historical retelling and we don’t have facts in the back of our mind to fall back on. There’s so much we don’t know about our main character, Alex, throughout the book, but that's the point — she's manipulative, young, beautiful, and whip smart. She twists herself to suit people's needs and find places to stay, if only temporarily. Much like those she manipulates, I cared deeply about what happened to Alex, without knowing much about her background. I do wish that we got to know more about her, as well as other characters like Jack and Dom. I loved The Girls for its depiction of female friendships, but The Guest did something almost opposite.

Big thank you to NetGalley and Random House for sharing this digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest opinions.

Thank you, Netgalley, for this much anticipated novel by Emma Cline. I absolutely loved The Girls and couldn't wait to read this one. Sadly, I was not a fan of Alex, the 22 year old left to her own devices after a breakup. Amazing writing definitely, otherwise I wouldn't have felt embarrassment and disgust throughout, but this one just wasn't for me.

The Guest is a thrilling examination of a broken young girl's mind as she claws herself the world of rich, problematic men, and the struggle of staying in it. Though its premise sounded to me like so many others of the so called "sad girl genre", The Guest stands out in both the style its written, very detatched, but stil offering deep insight into the mind and life of both Alex, the protagonist, and the people she comes across, but also in the fact that it reads more like a thriller than a lit-fic. The small period of time it takes place it, seven days, makes it claustrophobic, and the situations Alex gets herself in more and more horrifying as the story goes on, with its penultimate chapter, her stay with Jack, being particularly harrowing. Though I've had some dislike for Cline's work in the past, The Guest has made her an auto-read author for me.

Emma Cline proves, once again, she is the greatest working author of our time. Since her
massive bestseller (The Girls, 2016), Cline has slowly dripped out short stories which were
collected into her second release (Daddy, 2020). The short stories were excellent, but the
return to the novel form shows where she truly belongs.

The Guest follows another ingenue, slightly older and on a different coast, but similar to the
protagonist of The Girls, all the same. The young woman, Alex, is low on funds and, with only a
week left in the summer season, cons her way around the Hamptons—importantly never
referred to as the Hamptons—before the end-of-summer party thrown by her ex-boyfriend.
Alex is a call girl, it would seem, but there is never a specific label put on it—and that is one of
Cline’s greatest tricks; her unparalleled ability to be incredibly precise while simultaneously
being vague enough to leave room for the reader’s own thoughts to seep in.

The plot of The Guest is irrelevant. There is a plot and a version of escalating events, but if
action is what you’re coming for, look elsewhere. That is not what this book is about. Just like
Alex, it exists on the periphery, floating between wanting to be recognized and vanishing into
the breaking waves on the shore below. This book will wrap its tendrils into you from page one
and refuse to let go long after you’ve parsed through the final paragraphs.

The expectations are curious. Cline emerged onto the scene with a rumored multi-million-dollar
book deal that resulted in the triumvirate of The Girls, Daddy, and now The Guest. As her
oeuvre has grown, she has seemed increasingly less concerned with the public’s expectations, a
writer’s writer, perhaps. She has disappeared from book clubs and bestseller lists, but never
from the pages of venerated literary magazines such as The New Yorker, Granta, and The Paris
Review, to name a few. It is a difficult and pointless task to decide if The Girls or The Guest is
“better”. The Girls arrived in the world to a fever pitch and it was nearly impossible to keep them in
stock. It was, and remains, the most literary bestseller of the last decade. What was the
subject matter? Was it the perfect title? Was it because of Cline’s prose? I worry The Guest will
not have the same commercial impact, but unlike Alex, I really hope I’m wrong.

If you like reading, you’ll like reading The Guest. Five Stars.

The next book from Emma Cline, this is a character-driven book, all about the vibes, and I really liked it! 
*
You get very little information about Alex or her background, but essentially she's a sugar baby, and the man she's staying with in the Hamptons tires of her and kicks her out. She decides not to return to the city, so ends up on her own trying to figure out where to go and how to get by.  
*
We know almost nothing about Alex, and yet I felt this low-level anxiety throughout the whole book on her behalf. And not much happens plot-wise, but I was completely immersed. It's a fairly short book, just about 300 pages, and it felt like the right length. The pacing was spot on, and it never dragged. 
*
I ended up liking Alex a lot more than I expected to. She has her flaws, many of which she's up front about, but she also has this underlying naivete. It's easy to forget for much of it that's she's only 22, but then moments pop up to remind us just how young she is, especially to be in the situation she's in.
*
I imagine the ending will be controversial, so without spoiling anything I'll just say that I loved it!


**Will post on Amazon and Instagram on pub day. **

The Guest is another typical Emma Cline book where the setting is lavish and perfect but the plot not so much. There is a lot of rambling that kinda goes nowhere and this book could have easily been brought down to the size of a short story with the same effect. Nevertheless the book wasn’t horrible and I neither loved nor hated it. Just solid middle of the like for me.

Gah. Emma Cline nailed it again. I just love getting engrossed in her stories. She sets the mood so well.

First of all, this book was beautifully written and it’s no surprise since it’s from the author of The Girls, which I never read, cause I don’t like cults or Charles Manson – but I do know it was a bestselling novel. Now to talk about this book, The Guest centers around Alex – a young woman in her early 20’s who becomes a grifter for a week when her older boyfriend breaks up with her after a dinner date gone wrong.

I usually love unlikeable characters and I was invested in Alex’s plight and the ways she uses people for her benefit. But at the end of the day, I don’t get the point of this book. This book abruptly ends at its climax – so everything that has been building up to a certain moment ends up not being resolved and this truly irked me a lot. Especially since not much else happened in this book.

I meandered between boredom and secondhand embarrassment for Alex and yes, Emma Cline can write but does that necessarily make for an engaging plot? Sadly no. I’d forgive this book if it was all vibes and no plot, but it’s no vibes and no plot.

This is a pass for me.

*Thank you so much to NetGalley and Random House for the digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Having previously loved Emma Cline’s The Girls, I was really looking forward to The Guest; and it did not disappoint. I think that what they have most in common — and what works the best for me — is a tone of disturbing uncanniness; things aren’t quite right, but you recognise the truth of them all the same. With an unlikeable (and pretty much unknowable) main character who drifts and grifts her way through life (surviving on transactional sex and petty theft, dulling her senses and reactions with stolen prescription drugs), as the past threatens to catch up with Alex and we watch tensely as she uses a string of unsuspectingly useful fools to meet her needs in the moment, the reader (this reader) couldn’t help but care for her and want things to work out in the end. Like a mashup of Patrica Highsmith and Ottessa Moshfegh — set in a Gatsbyesque summer playground of the rich on private Long Island beaches — The Guest appealed to a sense in me beyond the heart and mind, as though Cline plucked some deep chord that resonated on an infrasonic level; I felt this more than I can explain it and will acknowledge that might be an entirely personalised reaction. Cline's writing just speaks to me and I am all ears.

This was my first Emma Cline book. I had heard so much about her novel, The Girls, that I was very excited to receive this ARC on NetGalley. Emma’s writing is captivating, descriptive and despite it being in third person I found it easy to connect to the MC, Alex. Alex is not even remotely a likable character, however, you can’t help but to feel for her as she bumbles from place to place trying to work her way back to Simon, her boyfriend, who kicked her out of the house at the beginning of the story. Over the course of about a week Alex stays with various strangers, with no other place to call home, as she runs from her past and tries to insert herself back into Simon’s life.
I struggled with rating this book because the writing in itself is great but the story left me with a lot of questions. The ending was abrupt and there is a great deal about Alex’s backstory that you have to just figure out for yourself. Overall, I wish there was more to the plot and a bit more excitement.

~Thank you NetGalley and Random House for the ARC of this book~

Note: I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

I had really enjoyed Cline's previous novel The Girls, but this one failed to grab my attention. I found the protagonist to be flat and one-note despite the "she isn't who she says she is" plot. The supporting characters did not capture my interest as they felt like mere ghosts or window-dressing. The pacing of the plot also felt like a slog with very little actually happening.

After reading 60% of the book, I had no desire to see where the story would finish and ultimately DNFed.

If I was still in my early 20s, I feel like this would have been a five-star read. It would have seemed bizarrely aspirational or at least artistically attractive, like some coming-of-age story that you could only understand if you were a 20-something New Yorker (which I was, once upon a time). Emma Cline is still pretty young - 33 compared to my nearly 39 - but girl, c'mon. We're too old for this s**t.

The problem with Alex, the protagonist, is that she seemed to have been dreamt up in a freshman Intro to Creative Writing class and never evolved beyond that. She's a swindler, drifter, lost soul, and we're with her for only a week or so at the end of summer in Long Island. I didn't find her particularly interesting and definitely not very likable. The rest of the characters in the book didn't fare any better - they were all surface-level sketches and caricatures with no real depth or anything to make them at all sympathetic or even realistic.

This book will no doubt appeal to many in a specific demographic (perhaps the one mentioned above), but I'm gonna need a bit more. In fact, the more time I spend on this review, the more I feel like 3 stars is generous!

I enjoyed The Girls but didn’t connect with Daddy. I was hoping this would be more like the former. It does have its moments and follows a story that feels somewhat unique. However, the characters feel so lifeless and the story goes nowhere. It also feels very long for a 304-page book, like a short story that never ends.

Reading this book made me feel bad, but I liked it! I do have to admit that I am generally growing weary of sociopathic hot women emotionally muted by muscle relaxers. However, this book managed to win me over due to the class implications of being "the guest." Being the guest in the way that Alex is a guest is to always be on the outside of wealth and belonging, face pressed to the glass. Nothing much happens in this book, which to me is a good thing. I appreciated the tiny peeks into the lives of a variety of sad people. It felt like walking alone on the pavement under a late afternoon sun - dazed after drinking a mimosa. I had enjoyed The Girls - which I listened to as an audiobook - as well as Emma Cline's short story collection, Daddy. The Guest felt more sparse than both of these, the missing information or hinted history felt -to me- a little lazy rather than purposeful and mysterious. Still, I tore through the book because the writing is good. Thank you to Net Galley for the advance copy.

When we first meet Alex, we know she is an imposter. We equally know that her reflections on this are simply an observer measuring the success of her disguise. Cline’s incisive narrative will dig into Alex’s head, exposing for us the sociopath within, a chancer who will manipulate and exploit without so much as a blink at conscience. Survival. A woman who can outwit a riptide.

The mystery of Alex, slowing unfolding, taps into our negativity bias, our hope for a dopamine fix as we puzzle out who this woman is, why she behaves as she does—the Pavlov dog that salivates when an opportunity to make a bad decision confronts her. We fear for her safety, that ever-looming Dom threat, indulge a morbid interest in watching someone self destruct.

The narrative will maintain a hum of tension as Alex works her way through Simon’s pill stash, until she snaps the end of her tether by disrespecting the fragile bubble in which May-December romances dwell. Where aging rich buys young love and will not suffer mockery. We cannot sympathize with either of them, Simon or Alex. They are both users.They differ in one way: he is the one with money. But let us resist the temptation to elevate this work to social commentary—wealth inequality, power imbalance. We must bookmark in our minds how they meet. Alex studies Simon, thinking he is not a good use of her energy. He is a civilian, she decides, a man whose self-conception embraces casual sex, not the kind for which he pays. She will have a change of heart when she realizes he can offer protection, give her some breathing room to turn things around. He is merely a mark. He happens to be a rich one, and that serves Alex’s purposes.

Alex is dispassionately aware that she burns every bridge she crosses. With a shrug, she knows there are always more bridges. This time, her self-delusion, the other devil on her shoulder, will convince her that Simon will cave. This is the point in her story when the vortex that began in her hometown, the one that etched the arc of her life, begins to lose momentum. She will circle a drain in this rarified beach enclave, with each loop a rerun of the prior con. At some point, we’ll tire of her, of her indecency, moral blankness. The swindle will wear thin, no matter how beautifully Cline writes it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing this eARC.

Despite there not being a traditional plot, it was easy to get sucked into this book. The Guest was an interesting and quick psychological thriller. Alex is a fascinating character who could fit in with anyone. If you liked Cline’s other book, The Girls, you will like this book!

The Most Anticipated Mystery and Thriller Books of 2023

This year’s psychological thrillers and suspenseful mysteries are really going places—literally.

There are villas and chalets and boarding schools and writing retreats and cooking competition tents. Cat-and-mouse chases span small-town Virginia to the far edges of Long Island, trekking up and down the Alps and across Italy. The inspiration for these page-turners is also wonderfully rich, from Great British Bake Off to Frankenstein to slasher films, postpartum anxiety to diversity fails to grifter culture. These Final Girls and anti-hero(ine)s are nearly killing themselves to confront the past, or just get through the next five days. And, if you can believe it, these books represent only the first half of 2023!

The Guest by Emma Cline

Release Date: May 16 from Random House

After her take on the Manson Family in The Girls, Emma Cline turns her eye to our current favorite guilty pleasure in the grifter. Alex is young enough, pretty enough, shrewd enough—and, most importantly, self-deceiving enough—to attach herself to wealthy older men for long enough to wear their gifted gowns and sleep in their Long Island mansions all summer. But after her self-destructive tendencies cause her latest beau Simon to detach himself from her, Alex has nowhere to go, and a vindictive ex back in the city.

But this Gen Z scam artist is convinced that she just has to make it to Simon’s Labor Day party to beg forgiveness. The only problem is, she needs to waste a week on the East End. While not a traditional thriller, the sheer anxiety level of watching Alex lure each new stranger (from the help to lonely rich teenagers), filling the endless hours until the next morning, will keep your blood pressure as high as if you were following a serial killer stalking their next victim.

I needed a few days after finishing this book to decide how I felt about it. What I liked: It was well-written. The constellation of characters were interesting. She captures the time/place very well.
What didn't work for me: The snapshot view of a narcissistic and self-destructive person that does not evolve one bit throughout the story. We just see Alex at one moment in her life with very little else. She is not a good person, though she's not really supposed to be. Is this a character study? I would have liked to know more about Alex but she's pretty one-dimensional with no history. We see everything from her perspective but without knowing her, if that makes sense. I pretty much cringed through the entire book and kept thinking, "Girl, get your shit together!". She is someone who could own the world if she actually tried but instead just moves from one self-destructive episode to the next, not giving a shit about herself or anyone else for that matter. Zero evolution of character or circumstance, if anything it just gets worse with each page turn. Overall, it was depressing and sad. But, like I said, it was well-written. I think I just wanted *more* but I also think the snapshot story was the point.