I've been making my way through the Emma Cline catalog this summer, and it has been a RIDE. I've been listening to them on audiobook through Libby (shoutout to Libby, support your local library) primarily in the car as I either road trip to my parents' house in Michigan or back to my apartment in Chicago. If I listen to most audiobooks on 1.25x or 1.50x speed, I can finish them in the roughly five hours that trip typically takes. When I was listening to The Guest, I was racing against the clock because I want to finish the book before my loan expired.

The Guest follows Alex, a sex worker/scammer who gets kicked out of her older boyfriend's Hamptons house a week before Labor Day. With nowhere to go and the looming threat of an ex-client trying to track her down, Alex resolves to win back her ex at his Labor Day party in seven days. She puts on different personas and weaves her way in and out of different people's lives, trying to convince herself everything will work out for her in the end.

Honestly, stressing out about finishing The Guest before my library loan expired perfectly fit the mood of The Guest. It's an incredibly stressful, tense novel. Alex is an agent of chaos. She wrecks the lives of everyone she interacts with while insisting what she did is actually okay. believing everything will be okay. As a reader, we're not meant to like Alex per se. She's deeply unreliable and amoral; however, you are invested in seeing if she can actually manage to come out on top in the end or even if you can trust anything she says.

All of Emma Cline's work exists in the Cool Girl Lit space, and I do think each of her works has something interest to say about girlhood and what it is like to move as a woman in the world. I'd recommend if you're ready to be incredibly stressed out. Otherwise, maybe skip.