Order History
Premium Membership & Rewards
Help Center / FAQ
Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire is A Dark Ode to High School Friendship
In 1991, no one could have possibly foreseen the tragic death that would befall Kurt Cobain. Hannah Dexter certainly doesn’t when, in her junior year, her brand new cool and edgy best friend Lacey Champlain introduces her to Nirvana’s angsty anthems. Lacey herself doesn’t see any eerie connection between Kurt’s mournful wailing on “Something in the Way“ and the fact that Craig Ellison, the most popular boy in school, has apparently just marched into the woods and shot himself in the head for no reason at all. The reader does, though. From the first chapter of Girls on Fire, we get an uneasy sense of foreboding. It’s clear that, in the small town of Battle Creek, Pennsylvania, the kids are not all right—and the worst may be yet to come.
Ships in 1-2 days.
The story revolves around Hannah, who is smart, sensitive, and desperate to be liked. When charming, bad news rule-breaker Lacey clomps her Doc Martens onto the scene and urges Hannah to change her look, her musical taste, and even her name, Hannah is eager to comply. The two soon become inseparable, telling each other their deepest secrets, wearing each other’s clothes, and plotting prankish vengeance on everyone who does them wrong. One of the people who insists on regularly doing just that is the queen of the popular crowd and girlfriend to the late Craig Ellison, Nikki Drummond. Nikki is wilier than she seems, however, and she soon inserts herself in between Hannah and Lacey in a clear effort to destroy their bond.
Good girl meets bad girl, gets a taste of the bad-girl-life, sees the error of her ways, goes back to being good. That’s the morality trope quagmire that Girls on Fire could’ve fallen into, never to be heard from again. Thankfully, it doesn’t. The book is refreshing in its agility—the second you think you’ve got it pegged, it gives you the slip and heads in an entirely new direction. Instead of “good girl” and “bad girl,” what we get is closer to “good girl who wants desperately to be bad but is not very good at it and is subsequently full of rage,” and “bad girl who is maybe just a misunderstood girl…who may or may not be a sociopath.” For my money, this is a far more interesting cast of characters. We’re never quite sure who we can trust—a theme sure to be familiar to anyone who has gone through teen-hood and lived to tell the tale.
Ships in 1-2 days.
Speaking of, if you are the type who likes to look back fondly on your high school years, consider yourself warned: this book promises to remind you that it wasn’t all swim meets and homecoming dances and good-natured fun at the sub’s expense. This is Wasserman’s first novel for adults, and it’s clear that years of writing dark young adult fiction have sharpened her ability to bring high school’s spiny underbelly into sharp relief. This book reminds us that high school appears to be all fun and freedom…as long as you’re not going through it yourself. For those poor souls who are knee-deep in the back-stabbing, the gossiping, the rigid and all-powerful caste system that is popularity—it can be a battleground. For many, high school is equal parts magic, boredom, and pure pain.
This book captures the cathartic mess of it all with artful prose that is chock full of fervent sensuality. Girls on Fire is a brilliant tale of love and betrayal between friends—complete with a can’t-look-away climax that will make your hair stand on end.
Girls on Fire is on shelves May 17.