Claire Messud

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. 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. "Messud's prose grabs the reader by the collar."--New York Times Book Review "Adept at evoking complex psychological territory."--The New Yorker "Messud writes about happiness, and about infatuation--about love--more convincingly than any author I've encountered in years."--NPR

A Novel

The Burning Girl

A bracing and hypnotic portrait of the complexities of female friendship from the New York Times bestselling author of The Woman Upstairs. Julia Robinson and Cassie Burnes 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: while Julia comes from a stable, happy, middle-class family, Cassie never knew her father, who died when she was an infant, and has an increasingly tempestuous relationship with her single mother, Bev. When Bev becomes involved with the mysterious Anders Shute, Cassie feels cruelly abandoned. Disturbed, angry and desperate for answers, she sets out on a journey that will put her own life in danger, and shatter her oldest friendship. Compact, compelling, and ferociously sad, The Burning Girl is at once a story about childhood, friendship and community, and a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about childhood and friendship. Claire Messud brilliantly mixes folklore and Bildungsroman, exploring the ways in which our made-up stories, and their consequences, become real.

Moray Lyle McIntosh

I’m hugely conflicted about this novel and swung several times between irritated and impressed. The foreshadowing is heavy-handed and seems to reduce rather than build the tension at the beginning but then the plot took hold of me and I was definitely curious. It’s a shame that the climax was ruined by a trite and unsophisticated plot device. I hate revelatory dreams used in this way, particularly when they appear so fortuitously and without precedent in a narrative. It smacks as an easy way to an otherwise unlikely event and is frankly lazy writing.

The story revolves around the intense friendship of Julia and Cassie, young girls friends from their earliest years despite the stark contrast in their family circumstances. It’s not a new tale and the bonds between the two girls are strained by conflict, adolescence and society. The voice of the narrator Julia jars. She’s supposed to be very young but her narration and her thoughts are those of a much older woman.

There are some powerful passages about female vulnerability, especially on biased judgement and vicious rumour but these lay a little awkwardly with the story, as if they were either an afterthought tagged on or as if the story struggled to accommodate them. The same was true of some of the musings on the nature of stories and reality in defining a person’s identity. Overall, an uneven and quite frustrating novel.

Laura

One of the contemporary novelist's best loved stories is one of the death of a friendship, especially if it happens to be about two girls. I suppose because that way you can explore two very different personalities and how they work against each other and the "psychology of growing up" and all that fun literary fiction nonsense that Man Booker short lists are made of. But something that I realized while reading Claire Messud's The Burning Girl is that there's not much new that really can be said about the topic. These many growing apart stories all basically hold the same coming of age message, the same message that mothers have been telling children since the dawn of time- you aren't always going to be best friends with the same person you were best friends with in elementary school. I've been told that as a child, and I bet you have been too.

And not only that, everyone's also got a best friendship falling apart due to the very different paths they took story, me included. And usually, the stories are pretty similar, and sadly, usually involve one party turning out better than the other. In that respect, The Burning Girl reminded me strongly of my own friendship with a girl, let's call her C, who never really had a stable home life or a future the way I was lucky enough to have. And, like Julia's mom, I'm sure my mother was happy enough when that friendship died without any drama, but it still hurt that someone who was once my best friend- not only that, someone whose house I was at basically every weekend for a year when I was in fourth grade- went on such a drastically different life path. So in that respect The Burning Girl was quite realistic with the way Julia and Cassie's relationship went on a slow decline in middle school.

The Burning Girl feels like it would say something new and different about the old friendship dying story mostly due to how artfully it's written. And it is really written quite beautifully with several scenes calling to mind my own childhood in New England and running around in the woods surrounding my house, wading in rivers or building forts out of old trees. But as the book progressed, it seemed like Messud's writing was mostly to distract from the fact that this story had been told a million times before, and that this book added nothing more to that particularly tropish story. 

Another thing that was supposed to set this apart from other stories along the same lines as this is that, despite the teenage characters, this is an adult book that just happens to have a teenaged main character. It was written like an adult looking back on her adolescence, something along the same lines as Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves and it would have worked better like that. Two years just doesn't strike me as enough time to get retrospective about childhood friendships. 

Continue reading this review on my blog here: https://bookwormbasics.blogspot.com/2...

Megan Parrott

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.The Burning Girl was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, NPR, Financial Times, Town & Country, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Refinery29, and Literary Hub.

The Burning Girl A Novel

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