One of the pleasures of Emma Cline's first novel, The Girls - in which an unhappy 14-year-old in California takes refuge with a raggedy group not unlike the cult that surrounded Charles Manson - is its immediacy. Technically, Evie Boyd is telling us her story from the vantage point of adulthood, which she has reached nearly unscathed despite missing the famous murders only by centimetres, but the reader spends most of the novel submerged in her experience of the summer of 1969.Almost entirely lacking in stale period detail, the book is a trancelike accumulation of intense adolescent feelings and myopic impressions: "slurry days", blushes "clotting" cheeks, dresses "stuttering with loose stitching", the "brackish sea" of an older girl's cocaine-coated mouth when she kisses Evie.It is for love of this magnetic, dark-haired girl, Suzanne (who bears some resemblance to the Manson Family's Susan Atkins, known as Sexy Sadie), that Evie first falls in with the group, and it's on her that Evie's gaze focuses most intently: "Even the pimples I'd seen on her jaw seemed obliquely beautiful, the rosy flame an inner excess made visible."Evie is the child of a philandering father. Evie's mother replaces him with a series of equally unpromising men and other fads.A little money left by her grandmother, an actress, is enough to make Evie an asset to Suzanne and the others. She's soon stealing from her mother and the neighbours to help fund Russell (the Manson figure) and his retinue.Evie is a familiar type of teen protagonist: needy, passive, drifting, usually adjacent to the action.As an adult, she recalls "how they told me I was having fun all the time, and there was no way to explain that I wasn't" and the panic of being asked by the family physician to describe where it hurt or what she felt ("I needed to be told, that was the whole point of going to the doctor").The idea that "just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself" is important: she and the other girls are drawn to Russell, wanting "to be part of this amorphous group, believing love could come from any direction. So you wouldn't be disappointed if not enough came from the direction you'd hoped."The fact that it is not Evie who ends up killing the book's Sharon Tate stand-in seems only a matter of circumstance.But it's also because the 27-year-old Cline is more interested in the gruesomeness of girlhood in general than in the more particular violence that the Manson crew eventually perpetrated. Although the setting is rendered both vividly and delicately, the novel does not attempt anything world-historical.What's odd about this slender, absorbing book is that, while the Manson backdrop is necessary to its intensity, and our knowledge of what must come lends Evie's longings a propulsive significance, it also creates some of the novel's few false notes.The flashes of exposition - "The books would identify this as the day things turned between Russell and Mitch"; "Russell had put me through a series of ritual tests. Perfected over the years that he had worked for a religious organisation near Ukiah" - feel like jarring interruptions to the book's main concern.This is, or should have been, the notion that there is something about being a girl, about what girls are subjected to, that might make you capable of murder.Usually no one dies or goes to prison, but the rest of it, Cline suggests - neglect, exploitation, sexual assault - is just what girlhood is like. - © The Daily Telegraph'The Girls' by Emma Cline is published by Chatto & Windus, R305..