I read and loved The Girls, so I was very excited to receive this ARC. The Guest did not disappoint. A novel about a listless, penniless, self-destructive 22-year-old woman who gets kicked out by her sugar daddy. With nowhere to live and no money, Alex finds herself latching on to anyone she can use to keep herself afloat.

I found myself wanting to yell at Alex for being so completely self-destructive and immature, but at the same time I was like, this sounds kind of fun… I miss being a dumb 20-something whose biggest enemy is herself. Cline beautifully illustrates the feeling of being "other" and the feeling that you exist merely to serve others. That your needs come second to those you're working for.

The tone is absolutely sublime. I love the hazy, summer feel the book evokes. I can easily imagine this being turned into an A24 film. I want this movie to be made, and I’m sure it’s already been optioned. It’s not very plot enough, but there’s enough forward momentum that it didn’t bother me. I also connected with the main character, so plot wasn’t as important to my enjoyment of this book.

I will note, there is a lot of white woman privilege on display. Alex wouldn’t have gotten away with 90% of what she does if she wasn’t an attractive young white woman. So heads up if something like that will drive you crazy!

The Guest is more of a character study than a plot driven story. It follows Alex, a twenty two year old spending the summer in a wealthy coastal town. While the word escort is never expressly used, it’s clear that Alex has spent a significant portion of her life seeking out arrangements with rich, older men.
After a few careless mistakes, Alex’s comfortable arrangement with wealthy Simon is ripped out from under her, while at the same time a violent man from her past seems to be closing in on her. We watch her over one week, while she tries to survive using only her wits and manipulation skills.
Cline’s first novel, The Girls, was one of my favorite five star reads last year, so when I saw this book was available I knew I had to have it. Once again, Cline has proven that she is a master of women’s fiction. The story, while largely lacking in action, crackles with tension. When I read The Girls, what really struck me was the hazy, almost muted summertime feeling. One that makes you nostalgic for warm nights, wet skin and sand, an ocean breeze.
If you’re looking for action, this may not be the book for you. The plot, while intriguing, is not the central point. We spend time in Alex’s head and ask ourselves what her motivations are, why she needs to seek out these arrangements. We see how her past experiences have shaped her into who she is, and her increasing desperation as she starts to miscalculate her next moves.
This is a great book for fans of morally gray main characters. I couldn’t help but root for Alex, but it was also clear that she didn’t mind hurting other people if it could benefit her. However, there are several trigger warnings I would be remiss not to mention here, including physical and sexual violence, drug abuse, and mental illness. If this is something you’re comfortable reading, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

An intriguing character study of a young woman struggling to find her place in the world. Alex is already world-weary and older than her 22 years when she spends the week leading up to Labor Day drifting around the Hamptons. She has no money, no home, and a barely working phone, but manages to squeak by. She realizes that she ruins everything she touches, both literally and figuratively, but she still can't help herself by making decisions that make her situation worse. Close to a five-star review, but I wasn't sure about that ambiguous ending. This was a quick read - I read it in one sitting in just about three hours.

Thank you Netgalley and Random House Publishing for the eArc!

In theory, this book is everything I go for in a contemporary novel. I always gravitate towards the unlikable young woman main character trying to navigate her life; I think it’s interesting and fun, and I especially was drawn to the premise of this one where she jumps from place to place after a “breakup”.

Unfortunately, this is a rare occurrence where a book like this wasn’t for me. In the beginning, I was a little bit confused about Alex as a character. I personally prefer character driven stories, and Alex’s character sounded interesting, but I felt like throughout the book I only got to know her on a surface level, and therefore wasn’t really rooting for her. It felt more like a vibey book than either character or plot driven, which I actually like, but there were so many unknowns that I grew restless. The pace is slow, and with neither characters I loved, nor thick plot to move me forward, I felt it was hard to get through. I love the cover and the blurb so much but this one didn’t work for me.

3.5 stars

This is my usual type of book. A lost 20-something, usually morally gray in their thought processes, and we follow them through their daily lives. I would say this one is more character based than plot based. It’s a bit of a character study into the mind of the main character after a specific event. She’s a guest at all of these different places, which provides insight into her personality based on the kind of guest she is. I think this one just failed to grasp me in the beginning. I enjoy it overall and felt I would’ve just enjoyed it so much more if my attention was just taken by the book and I felt the urge to read it.

I read Girls a few years ago and while I don’t remember much about the plot I do remember how Cline’s writing made me feel- uncomfortable? Anxious? I don’t know how to explain it, but her descriptive language just does something to me. From anyone else I think it would be pretentious but it just works for her.

This book was a bit of a rollercoaster in that I never quite knew where it was going. It felt like the big plot twist or climax was just around the corner the entire time, and while the ending certainly didn’t give me that satisfied feeling (I flipped ahead and back three times), it still worked for me.

It has Elin Hilderbrand vibes but dark.

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!