The Burning Girl
Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship. The Burning Girl is a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about youth and friendship, and straddles, expertly, childhood's imaginary worlds and painful adult reality--crafting a true, immediate portrait of female adolescence.
Claire Messud, one of our finest novelists, is as accomplished at weaving a compelling fictional world as she is at asking the big questions: To what extent can we know ourselves and others? What are the stories we create to comprehend our lives and relationships? Brilliantly mixing fable and coming-of-age tale, The Burning Girl gets to the heart of these matters in an absolutely irresistible way.
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Messud is committed to the deep emotional excavation of her characters, revealing and exploring the complex inner impulses that fuel their stories...the author's prose and insights are breathtaking...With this novel, Messud brings her own particular brand of astuteness and emotional intelligence through her careful and thoughtful prose.
[An] intense coming-of-age novel. . . . Messud captures the complicated nature of contemporary adolescence through a nuanced portrait of childhood love and loyalty deteriorating under the pressure of approaching adulthood.--Jane Ciabattari
Ms. Messud is at her most incisive in exploring the volatile transition from childhood to adolescence.--Sam Sacks
[A] masterwork of psychological fiction...Messud teases readers with a psychological mystery, withholding information and then cannily parceling it out.--Julia Klein
Messud is psychologically astute about her characters and about the competing social and familial pressures...that make adolescent friendship and its dissolution so fraught.
[Messud] has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives...Long before the recent success of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan tetralogy, which tells of the complex, often vexed, lifelong friendship between two women, Messud was narrating these stories with an unusual intensity--and quietly making a case for women's interiority as a subject worthy of the most serious examination.--Ruth Franklin
