Girls on Fire: A Gripping Psychological Thriller of Obsessive Female Friendship, Betrayal, and Dark Teenage Years

Like Megan Miranda's "All The Missing Girls," this is a novel about girls in the intensity of their teenage years, and about how choices made then will affect them for the rest of their lives. And like Miranda, Robin Wasserman has previously written novels for young adults. And like the other novel, I found this one extremely well done with a few flaws. The story here, again, can have happened only in those intense years when the world seems wide open, yours for the taking, when you're either "in" or "out," and such things seem as important as life and death. Wasserman does an excellent job of making you feel that intensity, feel the world of the girls and how completely separate it is from the world of the adults. It's a story that could happen. The one flaw, I felt, is that it is drawn out too long. One sees where it's going, and it takes a few "beats" too long to get there. It's a subtle thing, but when you're working with a page turner, you don't want the reader to get tired. As a reader, you really don't want to be looking forward to the end, and that happened for me, just a bit. But Wasserman is a terrific writer; she knows how to create atmosphere, and she creates characters who are definitely not just cookie cutter images. It's a really good novel, and I hope she keeps going, because I feel strongly that she can do better. And I love long novels, but every sentence must be there because it has to be. This one could have used a bit of tightening.

I wanted to love this book more than I did; it held so much promise, and it was beautifully written, but it felt like Wasserman was pandering to adult themes in order to debut her first book for adults, saying, "Hey, guys, look, I can write for adults! Sex! Drugs! Violence!" Maybe I'm way off base here, but I found it to be unbelievable that three teenage girls would all be this wretched. I was a teenage girl not all that long ago (less than a decade), and a teenage girl lives in my home, and frankly, I couldn't believe what these characters did to and did for each other. These three young women were so morally debased at the culmination of the novel--I should point out I'm not referencing the boldness of themes addressing homosexuality, gender heteronormativity, etc.--far beyond the exploratory behaviors of teenagers and other young adults (and this is coming from someone who is not religious or particularly conservative); it essentially didn't even make sense to me. In the end, the plot was miserable to get through because at every turn, I found myself thinking, "What is wrong with all of you?! You're terrible for each other!" because to me, it seems unlikely that this many people would be this terrible. Not to mention that crimes like this would just get swept under the rug. The book is set in the early '90s; forensic technology was not that backwards. So, if you read it, read it for the beauty of the writing, which is truly, truly great, and suspend some belief as you're making your way through the plot. Prepare to cringe and *facepalm* and maybe even be glad it's over at the end because you were just wanting to be out of the tendrils of these young women's miserable lives, which I'll add, they created purely for themselves because they were bored and deranged and, like most teenagers, short-sighted as all get out.

Imagine John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club remade by Quintain Tarantino with a soundtrack by Nirvana instead of Simple Minds & R-rated for nudity, sex, violence & language. That’s how I envision a movie version of Girls on Fire. The setting is “the butt crack of western Pennsylvania”--an imaginary rust-belt town called Battle Creek somewhere near Pittsburgh, Bruce Springsteen country. The plot involves discovering what happened to the high-school athlete Craig Ellison, an apparent suicide by gunshot, & a struggle for the soul of Hannah Dexter, a junior @ the school. Her BF, the grunge-girl wild-child worshipper of Kurt Cobain, Lacey Champlain, wants to turn “Dex” into a goth-girl; their frenemy, teen-princess Nikki Drummond, would transform “Hannah” into a Monongahela Valley Girl. In fiction these days it is the teens who are resourceful & knowledgable & the adults who are helpless & clueless. That is not surprising when the parents themselves think that they are still teenagers, exemplified by Dex’s father Jimmy, whose mid-life crisis he would resolve by restarting his old garage band & fumbling with Lacey in the darkened movie theater where he barely manages to hold down a job. Of course real teenagers are much better @ being teenagers than are 40-somethings. Setting in the early ‘90s is both realistic & somewhat overdone. Battle Creek seems overrun with “Christian” fundamentalists obsessed with Satanism. There was a scare about devil worshippers @ that time, but I think it centered more on day-care facilities than on high schools. I’d prefer to believe that even @ that time & place Hannah would have been recognized & treated as a rape victim rather than as a Satanic bad girl after what happened to her in the aftermath of Nikki’s foreclosure party. Perhaps fortunately, Lacey’s horrible stepfather--“the Bastard”--seemed too OTT as well, tho’ Lacy’s experience @ the “Christian” reform school was wonderfully harrowing, if gratuitous. I felt the author had to pad the narrative, the year that elapses after Craig’s death: the plot needed the economy, concentration & punch that Megan Abbott might have given it. This book needs toning, less sag & tighter story. The ‘90s setting was probably chosen less for the ambience of the period (tho’ we get an allusion to that very middle-aged teenager Bill Clinton) than that Kurt Cobain needed to still be alive. I loved the main characters Dex & Lacey, & even Nikki attracted me despite herself. But I found the very end of the story deflated & boring, as if the author simply gave up instead of devising a conclusion appropriate to the characters, unless like another Hannah, Arendt, Robin Wasserman wanted to portray the banality of evil. Morally tho’, I have reflect a lot more on Dex’s choice. Unlike in The Secret History, here the question of how far you should go for someone you love is much harder to answer. Committing a crime to save a friend & wanting to implicate a friend to share your guilt may be the same legally, but morally they are world’s apart. With Girls on Fire, Robin Wasserman belongs on the level with Megan Abbott, but more the Abbott of Fever than of Dare Me. I intend to read parts of this one again (wonderful to have both Kindle & audio), but probably not all the way through. So five stars--but one’s a bit dim.

It's not that it wasn't competently written--clearly this author is skilled. But the book was barely finishable for me. It felt like it didn't know what it wanted to be: a book about teenage girls in high school, but not in the YA category so it could actually reflect modern adolescence (ie. sex and drugs), or was it a thriller? It wasn't that the parts weren't competently done, it's just that they didn't mesh well. The teenage wasteland parts (as I call the parts that were mostly about the friendship between girls) was well done, though I didn't expect that was what I was reading, and frankly, if that was the book, it could have been half this length. If it's a thriller, it was very much NOT thrilling, and needed way more hints that it was going that way early on--by the time we got to the real plot of what happened to the guy who died in the beginning of the book, I'd forgotten that was what the book was about, and then the book careened into implausible action after implausible action. there were hints (red herrings?) that were particularly poorly done, like the fact that Lacey was forced to take meds (type never specified, and that was irritating, because there are hints that she is "going crazy" after she doesn't take them. But were they anti-depressants? Anti psychotics? It makes a difference, you know, and that whole line of the plot--Lacey's unraveling--got more and more far fetched as it went along. I suppose I should give the book credit: because I knew there was a "mystery" I did finish the book, even though I really wanted to abandon it halfway through. Also, here's another problem: only the "bad girls" were interesting (ie. Lacey and Nikki) and poor Dex was boring as hell, and her shifts in allegiance a little unbelievable too. And I didn't care for or need the adults' pov. Overall, I wish I had given this one a miss, though I did like hearkening back to the 90s, grunge, etc, and I do think the author did a good job of capturing a time period.

Is this really what adolescence is like? I admittedly lived a very quiet adolescence, but I remember all the intensity of feelings and friendships and the certainty that the teen years were all there were. The book captures a lot of these feelings, and then things get really weird. I think there is a line between believable adolescent horror (themes of sexual assault, homelessness, suicide) and then the truly horrifying. In the last 100 pages the book crosses that line, and I don’t understand how it ended up there. This book is certainly engrossing, but I think the author could have stopped just short of the most shocking event. I think the book would be better served with the same heightened emotions, without the hard-to-believe violence. It is certainly true that teens are capable of terrible things, but the event that stands out is like something from a particularly gruesome and cruel Law and Order episode. This book is worth a read, but it is not one I will return to.

Warning: Spoilers ahead. Let me preface this by saying I'm a child of the 90s and loved the grunge scene and Kurt Cobain, and I really, really wanted to like this book. However, I did not. This book wanted to be Gone Girl - but Wasserman isn't able to capture the complexities of a multidimensional character that the reader can root for in spite of their bad behavior. While the two main characters of Gone Girl are difficult to like, one stands out more than the other (by the end of the book), as truly sociopathic (the wife). The husband is definitely a self-absorbed man-child, however, you still can relate to him to a certain extent, and can even have sympathy for him. In this book, there are no likeable characters that anyone can relate to or sympathize with. As a former high school teacher and former teenage girl, I can say that high school girls are difficult to like. Not all of them, but a lot of them. It's okay - it's the time of your life you are allowed to be the worst possible version of yourself. However, there is always good with the bad. The three main characters of this book are just all bad. Hannah has no reason to be so dark and miserable; her parents are mostly happily married and they love her. Yet she hates life and everyone else. Of course we understand why Lacey is on the edge, and at times there is a glimmer of something like sympathy that pops up inside me for her, but on the whole, she turns out to be mostly unlikeable too. Don't get me started on Nikki. Although teenage girls can be self-absorbed drama queens and be mean to one another, I just found a lot of this book to be so far-fetched. If you don't like the main characters, or at least one of them, just a little bit, why do you care what happens to them? And I didn't care, but I kept reading just to find out what happened to Craig. There is so much sex, some drugs and some rock n' roll, and just sooo many unlikeable teens and people. That's what made the book so hard to get through. The author had a great idea, but she didn't manage to pull it off to the extent that you want Lacey or Dex to escape and start a new life; you just don't like either one of them so you just don't care. I wanted to like this book but it fell short. It did kind of turn into more of a young adult book at the end with just a lot of back and forth between the girls and annoying dialogue. And the whole scenario with how Craig died - too over the top. There is a lot of

What a surprisingly incredible novel. I truly didn't expect to love this book much. In fact, I was a bit turned off by the first page. But several pages later I was completely enthralled. The complex characterization is incredible, and I was on edge waiting to see what pivotal actions would change Dex inside and out. Readers who came of age in the 90s will enjoy the backdrop upon which this action ensues, and those who felt they were the "rotten" teens during the uptick of gothic grunge style will be especially entranced. I was on the edge of my seat throughout the read and, now that I've read the last page, I find myself yearning for me. I will be reading and re-reading this incredible book over the years, and sharing it with my teenage girlfriends who will appreciate it as much as I do.

I was excited to read this book but boy... This reads like a young adult novel, and not a very good one. I thought it was superficial and pandering, especially in its treatment of Kurt Cobain as a tragic idol which essentially just devolved into "omg Kurt Cobain amirite? He was depressed and I'm depressed so we're like the same and I love him" at least 20 times. So much of this was trying to be artsy but in an extremely obvious and off-putting way. Like on a couple of occasions dropping in fake physics terms that weren't related to anything? There's not nearly enough plot payoff to make up for the writing.