If you enjoy the layered ambiguity of The White Lotus, the wild ride of The Menu and/or a literary fiction unreliable narrator, you may very well love this book.

I was in a chokehold by this book from beginning to the end. 22 year old Alex is a detached character making one bad decision after another. She's essentially an unemployed grifter mooching off of older wealthy men that she regularly steals from. This habit has gotten her in a sticky situation. She plans to make amends with her most recent target, Simon, at his Labor Day party, but has to find a way to stay afloat with no money until then. She acts impulsively without considering the consequences for herself or others. It made me feel so uncomfortable how she pushes people's boundaries, crossing lines over and over again, never really taking responsibility for her actions. I wanted her to be rescued and punished for her often thoughtless actions at the same time, and I thought it was so interesting to feel that way about a character. To feel contempt and sympathy at the same time. This was more captivating in my opinion than her previous novel, The Girls. I loved it and bought a physical copy for my own shelf.

"The Guest" by Emma Cline is a captivating and atmospheric novel that delves into themes of longing, memory, and the complexities of human connection. Cline's evocative prose and vivid imagery draw readers into the protagonist's world, creating a sense of intimacy and introspection. With its haunting beauty and subtle emotional depth, "The Guest" is a powerful exploration of the human experience in all its fragility and wonder.

I hear a lot about Emma Cline, and this was my first book by her. I love a flawed character, and Alex is one that is both infuriating and relatable, personifying the phrase "living day to day" with a sense of boredom and delusion that made me question my own relation to it. Wonderfully written, and the cover is striking and gorgeous. Excited to read more of Emma Cline's work!

Taut, and built on a foundation of unease and deception. This is a fascinating and well written character study of a novel, but it is emotionally brutal. I thought this would be a variation on "Breakfast at Tiffany's", (the book, not the tinselly Audrey Hepburn film), but it turned out to be even darker, sadder, more melancholy and hopeless, and less forgiving of any of the characters. Who do you root for when neither the hunter nor the prey deserves sympathy, and who do you root for when it eventually becomes less and less clear who is the hunter and who is the prey? How do you combine grift and love, desire and desperation, security and menace, neediness and independence, in one barely adult lost character? Well, this book will run you, (and its heroine), through the wringer while you try to find out.

Alex is an early twenty-something spending her time as the girlfriend of an older rich man. When she makes a reckless mistake she’s sent packing with no money, no friends, and nowhere to go. Bouncing from one person and place to another (while avoiding her increasingly hostile drug dealer), she knows if she can just make it to the Labor Day party in a week everything will be okay. Alex is such a fascinating character - aimless and bored, semi-obsessed with pools, scheming for personal gain, and delusional about the dangerous people/situations she finds herself. And yet you root for her to be okay! The ending drove me a little crazy in a good and bad way. I’m still thinking about those last pages 🙃

I did not love this one. I was very excited because of how much I loved The Girls, but I could not get into this one. It didn't have the same excitement or pace to it. Maybe it didn't even have the same plot emphasis in the beginning so I just didn't get what the point was from the beginning and that is important for me to be able to get into a book and move forward.

I tried to read this contemporary literature novel because of the author. However, I found myself not connecting with it at all. Thank you netgalley for the early copy!

4.75*
this was near perfect for me! i absolutely was obsessed with Alex & i found this so difficult to put down while reading. it was very anxiety inducing not knowing how this was going to play out, felt very real to me. my only complaint is the ending felt like it leaped off that rocky cliff.

I really enjoy Emma Cline's writing, and while this wasn't my favorite, I enjoyed it. This is definitely a character-driven novel with very little plot or action, so if you don't like that sort of story, this may not be for you, but I love a morally grey lead so I ate this up.

The Guest comes out on the heels of continued grifter hype, somehow making an every-girl alluring, mysterious and addictively hateable.

The story is deceptively simple and masterfully told. Alex has secrets, but she can fool her way into any situation. She owes her roommates money and some dude named Dom is after her. Enter Simon, a deliciously rich man in his 50s who seems to have fallen for Alex’s charms. However, a misstep gets her kicked out of Simon’s life. A tiny error. Good thing Simon has a party at the end of the week. All Alex has to do is pass time, survive her own rot, and she will be welcome back at the party. Right? RIGHT?

It’s easy to hate Alex in the same breath it’s so easy to agree with her. She’s the perfect antihero, disrupting upper class Long Island summers with her disdain. It’s hard to tell if she has an agenda or is just trying on new shoes. The prose was light as a feather, tense but easy to slip through. I barreled through the book in a couple of days, was fully immersed and completely satisfied at the end. I know this book has been super hyped, but I think it lives up to it.

Wow, that was bad. Alex is a despicable character with no redeeming qualities. She's just a leech and I hated her. Nothing happens in this book. There's no plot. Just a trashy grifter leeching off other people because she can. She doesn't even have a reason for it.

Unfortunately, despite being a huge fan of Emma Cline, I couldn’t get into this book. The story didn’t grab me and the writing didn’t keep me engaged.

No question about it, this book was disturbing. It follows Alex, a young woman who lives on the fringes, glomming on to men who can support her or from whom she can steal drugs, or money, or who offer her for a time, a taste of a lifestyle that she would never by herself be able to afford. Alex is only twenty-two, but we know little else about her except that she may or may not have landed in NYC from a semi-rural community, has little or no one by way of family and no constant person who could be considered a friend. We get the sense something happened to Alex, though she never tells anyone, nor even thinks about what that may be.

All we know for sure is that now, Alex is a grifter, living off her youth and good looks, hoping to score something like permanence with a man who will keep her. And fortunately, Alex seems to have done so with Simon, a fifty something-year-old, very successful man who has taken her with him to his summer home in what sounds like the Hamptons. Simon buys her expensive gifts and takes her to exclusive parties, and expects little of Alex besides her presence, and of course, sex. For a while, Alex complies, but she is by her nature a n'er do well, and eventually, her old habit of screwing things up (for no reason other than that's what she does) rears its head and Alex finds herself once again adrift, chased by her own demons and someone else who's all to real.

Lots of reviewers didn't like this book simply because Alex herself was unlikeable, or because her errors were unforced ones, or because the plot seemed to meander. I think they may have missed the point. Alex does not like herself. Alex does not know why she screws up. And the plot meandered because it is the nature of Alex's existence. The author, IMO did not write a book that was pointless, she crafted a portrait of a person who is herself without focus, and understanding and insight about her own life. When an insight arises, she silences it with men, with drugs, with self-harm, occasionally by harming others, and observing people through a lens of malicious and predatory curiosity. She is a tragic figure well-drawn.

The ending also seemed to worry some people, but I thought it was pretty clearly about someone seeking to belong in a place where she transparently does not; fooling no one but herself. There's a lot of grit in this one, so if that's not your jam, skip it. But I'm going back to read Emma Cline's debut novel, 'The Girls' because this one was excellent contemporary fiction.

P.S. Check out Tama Janowitz's 'A Certain Age' if you liked this one. I would be very surprised if Emma Cline hadn't read and been inspired by it.

I LOVE Emma Cline and the guest was no exception. Absolutely adored this. The character development was next level. So relatable and loveable. I’d like to reread it asap.

The Guest is a fascinating, cerebral read about a woman willing to lie, cheat and steal to survive. Why is she so desperate? How did she end up here? These questions are never answered. Instead, we follow Alex through a week of swindling her way through the Hamptons. Conning one rich idiot after another. Before Alex even gets to the Hamptons, the grifting has already caught up with her. We just follow her along as the situation gets more dire, solutions seem farther away and as the pages dwindle, the solutions still don't appear. If you enjoyed Cline's first book, The Girls, you'll absolutely love The Guest.

I rarely read a book in one setting, but this story grabbed me from the very beginning. There is a tension and foreboding atmosphere, making you fell something bad is going to happen to Alex (the unlikable main character) or to someone she encounters due to her interactions with them. While Alex is unlikable for many reasons, and you know very little about her, somehow I found myself sympathizing with her plight. I'm not sure how I feel about the ending , but the lack of resolutions for the characters,didn't really detract from the overall plot 4.5 stars

Amazing read, you can finish this in one day. Emma Cline is trying something different than in GIRLS, which was a rather lush and long-winded book. Here, we get almost no detail; everything is clinical and severe, and the woman at the center of the story functions like a stage onto which we can project our fears, annoyances, and desires. I wish the ending was a little different--it's almost too neat/clean, but I understand she wants to leave it open rather than creating a heavy-handed bow.
I do want to see her write about something entirely different though –– maybe a novel from the perspective of a man.

I received this book as an ARC from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Thank you Penguin Random House and NetGalley!

This book was so deliciously awful, and I loved it.

This story is about a young woman named Alex that seems to have no real discernable personality traits other than the fact that she is an excellent manipulator and knows exactly what to do or say to get what she needs from a person or situation. We follow Alex as she meanders her way through life and people over the course of approximately a week. As she makes her way through these people, she leaves some serious emotional and physical damage in her wake.

Let me be clear about this story. There is no real plot going on, no "true" conflict, and certainly no resolution. This is not a book for those that need those things in a story. As a self-proclaimed lover of sad girl lit fic and stories about terrible women wandering their way through life, this was perfect for me. Some words that immediately come to mind when thinking about this book include: cringy, gross, and stifling, all with an overarching feeling of dread throughout the entire book.

While all of those things sound horrible, I really enjoyed this story. HOWEVER, I'm just begging lit fic authors: can we PLEASE stop using the neglect/abuse of animals as plot devices? It can really ruin a book for me.

Thanks again to Penguin Random House and NetGalley for this one! I should have read this story a lot sooner. It's a perfect summertime read.

Hmm. I've tried, I'm just not an Emma Cline girl. This story really didn't bring anything to the table, and it left me wondering why it even exists? Idk. Not my thing I guess. I felt the same about The Girls. She has some beautiful lines and her prose is lovely, but her stories just seem to be lacking.