The Burning Girl

by Claire Messud

Overview

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

"[A] masterwork of psychological fiction.… Messud teases readers with a psychological mystery, withholding information and then cannily parceling it out." —Chicago Tribune

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393635034
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/29/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	618,907
File size:	503 KB

About the Author

Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. A recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hometown:

Somerville, MA, USA

Place of Birth:

Greenwich, CT, USA

Education:

BA in Comparative Literature, Yale University, 1987, MA in English Literature, Jesus College, Cambridge University, 1989

Editorial Reviews

06/12/2017
Trying to console her heartbroken daughter, Julia Robinson’s mother muses, “Everyone loses a best friend at some point.” Julia is the narrator of Messud’s beautiful novel about two young girls, inseparable since nursery school in a small Massachusetts town, who feel they’re “joined by an invisible thread,” but who drift apart as they come of age. For years, Julia and Cassie Burnes have shared adventures and dreams, but as they cross the pivotal threshold into seventh grade, Julia feels betrayed when Cassie is drawn to boys, alcohol, and drugs. To the reader, the split seems inevitable. Julia is the product of a stable household, but Cassie’s blowsy, unreliable mother transfers her affection to a brutally controlling lover who destroys Cassie’s sense of security. Desperately unhappy, Cassie sets out to find the father she has never known and begins a spiral of self-destruction that Julia, now no longer Cassie’s intimate friend, must hear about from the boy they both love. Messud shines a tender gaze on her protagonists and sustains an elegiac tone as she conveys the volatile emotions of adolescent behavior and the dawning of female vulnerability (“being a girl is about learning to be afraid”). Julia voices the novel’s leitmotif: that everyone’s life is essentially a mysterious story, distorted by myths. Although it reverberates with astute insights, in some ways this simple tale is less ambitious but more heartfelt than Messud’s previous work. The Emperor’s Children was a many-charactered, satiric study of Ivy League–educated, entitled young people making it in New York. The Woman Upstairs was a clever, audacious portrayal of an untrustworthy protagonist. Informed by the same sophisticated intelligence and elegant prose, but gaining new poignant depths, this novel is haunting and emotionally gripping. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"[Messud] is an absolute master storyteller and bafflingly good writer.… It is that combination of imagination and skill that makes The Burning Girl exceptional.… It amplifies that subtle, piercing shift between Cassie and Julia, made brighter by passages of sheer splendorous prose."

|Los Angeles Times

"Messud is at her most incisive in exploring the volatile transition from childhood to adolescence."

Wall Street Journal

"[A] masterwork of psychological fiction…Messud teases readers with a psychological mystery, withholding information and then cannily parceling it out."

Chicago Tribune - Julia Klein

"Ms. Messud is at her most incisive in exploring the volatile transition from childhood to adolescence."

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"[Messud] is an absolute master storyteller and bafflingly good writer…It is that combination of imagination and skill that makes The Burning Girl exceptional…It amplifies that subtle, piercing shift between Cassie and Julia, made brighter by passages of sheer splendorous prose."

Los Angeles Times - Rebecca Carroll

"Messud is psychologically astute about her characters and about the competing social and familial pressures… that make adolescent friendship and its dissolution so fraught."

Boston Globe

"[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."

New York Times Magazine - Ruth Franklin

"[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."

BBC - Jane Ciabattari

"Breathtaking.… With this novel, Messud brings her own particular brand of astuteness and emotional intelligence through her careful and thoughtful prose."

San Francisco Chronicle

"Slim but impactful.… The Burning Girl asks how well we can ever know our closest confidants and answers its own question with every refined page."

Vanity Fair

"Messud captures young adolescence vividly and unjudgmentally.… Messud is a storyteller: the ability to compel and hold the reader’s interest may not be the crown and summit of novel writing, but it’s the beginning and end of it.… [T]he story rewards the reader right through to the end."

Guardian - Ursula K. Le Guin

"Claire Messud nails it… with The Burning Girl, a hypnotic coming-of-age novel about two small-town Massachusetts best friends, who grow up with strikingly different outcomes."

Elle

"The kind of book more common in the middle of the twentieth century than it is today; novels written for adults in the first-person voice of a child or adolescent but entirely accessible to readers of their protagonists’ age. You’ll know the ones I mean, school classics like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye…The Burning Girl has a more sophisticated structure, in its unobtrusive handling of the relation between its narrative voice and Julia’s younger self, and its moral complexities seem greater too."

New York Review of Books - Michael Gorra

"The friendship of two girls, Julia and Cassie, animates this slim, dreamlike novel.… Messud plays, lightly, with familiar archetypes, deftly abstracting her tale so that it flares into myth."

The New Yorker

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

From the Publisher

06/15/2017
Julia and Cassie are best friends from childhood, but starting in seventh grade they begin to drift apart. With her college-bound peers, Julia, the book's narrator, moives toward academics and the speech team, while Cassie gets involved with the party scene. Conflict with her mother and her mother's live-in boyfriend lead Cassie to increasingly reckless behavior. As Julia helplessly observes Cassie's downward spiral, her attempts to reach out are rebuffed, and she turns to Cassie's ex-boyfriend, Peter (whom Julia has always had a crush on) for solace. While the story line of friends taking different paths during adolescence is well-trod territory, Messud (The Emperor's Children) displays uncommon skill in depicting the conflicting interests and emotions of the tween years. The opening section is especially vivid in describing the summer before seventh grade, when the girls, with one foot still in childhood, struggle to fill their idle hours with exploration and imagination. In giving the sole narration to Julia, Messud somewhat paints herself into a corner, as the accounts of Cassie's experiences told to Julia through Peter include a level of observational detail that defies plausibility. VERDICT Despite some drawbacks, the narrative has broad appeal for teens and adults alike. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/17.]—Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Library Journal

10/01/2017
In Julia's first memory of her best friend, Cassie is standing in the middle of their preschool playground, looking like a sprite with her shiny white hair and tiny stature. From that moment on, they belong to each other. Fast-forward through years of imaginative games and adventures to the summer before seventh grade. That summer a pit bull shreds Cassie's arm, necessitating a visit to Dr. Anders Shute, who comes to play a terrible role in the girl's life. That same summer the girls discover Bonnybrook, an abandoned asylum for women. But seventh grade brings change. Cassie finds a new, wilder friend, and the girls grow apart. Julia, whose life is filled with opportunity, attempts to reconstruct the series of events that led to Cassie's ultimate tragedy, relying on hearsay and her presumption that she can still intuit her friend's thoughts and emotions. From Julia's perspective, Cassie is surrounded by danger: men driving cars in the dark, boys piling into bathrooms at parties, and the creepy Anders Shute, who married Cassie's mother. Teens who love novels taut with psychological tension will be intrigued by Cassie's downward spiral and Julia's curious role as storyteller. Much more than a tale of friendship gone awry, this dark work explores the roles we accept, those we reject, and those we thrust upon others. VERDICT A gripping coming-of-age narrative that will appeal to fans of Emma Cline's The Girls or Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You.—Diane Colson, formerly at City College, Gainesville, FL

School Library Journal

★ 2017-06-05
Messud (The Woman Upstairs, 2013, etc.) investigates the fraught intricacies of friendship and adolescence as two girls grow up and grow apart in a small Massachusetts town.About to start her senior year of high school, narrator Julia painfully traces the loss of her childhood friend Cassie, a bold rule-breaker who goaded and thrilled cautious Julia even as she relied on her friend's good sense to keep them safe. During the charmed intimacy of childhood, Julia wistfully recalls, "we had one mind and could roam its limits together, inventing stories and making ourselves as we wanted them to be." But in seventh grade Cassie drifts away to a more popular crowd, adding insult to injury by dating and then dropping Peter, an older boy she knows Julia likes. With characteristically lucid prose, Messud perfectly captures the agonizing social insecurities of middle school in Julia's seething assessment that Cassie "thought she could laugh at me to my face…she was Regina George from Mean Girls and I was Janis." Payback comes when Cassie's widowed mother, Bev, falls in love with Dr. Anders Shute, who may have an unhealthy interest in Cassie and certainly encourages Bev to confine and control her in ways that lead to a crisis. By this time, Julia has new friends of her own and a more secure social niche in ninth grade; she knows Cassie is in trouble but is too hurt and too invested in her new role—this is very much a book about masks and performances—to respond when Cassie tentatively reaches out. Although their shared past gives Julia the knowledge to forestall disaster when Cassie vanishes, Messud also suggests that we never truly know another, not even those we love best. That stark worldview only slowly becomes apparent in a narrative that for a long time seems more overwrought than events call for (it is, after all, narrated by a teenager), but by the novel's closing pages it packs an emotional wallop. Emotionally intense and quietly haunting.

Kirkus Reviews