The Burning Girl: A Novel

Julia and Cassie have been best friends since they were classmates in nursery school. When the pair diverge while in middle school, with Cassie heading down a dangerous path, will Julia be there for her oldest friend in her time of need?

The Burning Girl lacked cohesion, which ultimately made this book a miss. The author did not take the time to build the characters and their stories, but instead threw in a bunch of situations to make the plot go in the desired direction. The motivation of the characters is hardly ever mentioned, which made the book feel unfinished. I finished the novel for two reasons: because I had hope that the author would tie the whole story together and because it was short enough that the time it took to read was negligible. The Burning Girl lacked a proper reveal and, in the end, I was left with the feeling that the characters had more yet to say. For these reasons, I would not recommend The Burning Girl to other readers.

The entire point, for me, of being in book clubs, is being forced to read books that one would not normally attempt. This book certainly fits into that category for me. Sometime it’s a hit and sometimes it’s a miss. Unfortunately, this one is a miss for me.

This novel tells the story of the breaking friendship between two middle-school-aged girls. Friends since preschool, they are drifting apart for the reasons that typically cause these things: different interests, different personalities. Things that become more important when people get a bit older.

In the end, though I felt Ms. Messud did a nice job of getting inside the minds of these girls, there just wasn’t any heft to this book. When I finished, it already felt vague and wispy to me. It’s not the kind of story I’m going to be able to hold onto.

Messud is on her way to becoming a stellar literary force. Superb writing with surprising twists and turns.

The story: Julia is an studious thoughtful teenager who has a strong bond with her childhood friend Cassie, a transgressive and fiery young woman who has lost her way and the thread of their friendship. They forged their bond from early childhood and created their own world in their early teens during risky adventures that take Julia past her comfort zone. Themes of loyalty and betrayal are explored along with the difficult transitions of youth.

The characters: Messud is a master at creating vivid characters who bring the story into living breathing clarity. She creates the way for us to inhabit them and feel their lives.

I liked the beginning of the book, yet the storytelling aspect was a bit much. This story was about two girls who had a good friendship in nursery and elementary school and then drifted apart. It is told by Juju, who has a flair for being dramatic. How much of the story was her own exaggeration and real is hard to say.
I was left disappointed that the narrator, Juju, did not know why Cassie wanted to end her life and where she ended up. Three stars due to the writing style and the ending.

3.5 Stars

Julia and Cassie meet in nursery school and are best friends from that moment on. Cassie is the power and spirit in their duo and Julia is the steadfast and careful one. The dynamic works until the end of middle school when what was so strong starts to fray. Cassie makes a new friend, a girl she used to mock with Julia, for being so silly and interested in boys. Julia watches as the closest friend she’s ever known slips away and even when she knows things are not all right, her old friend doesn’t want her help. Claire Messud explores this most delicate of relationships in her new novel, The Burning Girl.

As is often the case it a boy who lies at the heart of the shift in Julia and Cassie’s friendship. In this case, it’s Peter who Julia has a crush on, but who does not feel the same way. He likes Cassie.

Between this betrayal and Cassie’s propulsion into an older, cooler crowd, Julia finds herself left behind. Her interest in academics and playing it safe no longer fit with the new Cassie. Messud compounds the issues by layering in an external element—Cassie’s mother’s boyfriend, who moves in with them. His interest in Cassie and his determination to impose his strict religious beliefs on her only exacerbate her behavior and move her further away from Julia, who still knows her friend well enough to know that something is wrong.

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The author's observations on late childhood and young adulthood were spot-on. I resonated with many of Julia's observations of herself and her friends. I remember feeling much the way she did in the story as many of my friends from early childhood went on to blue collar educational opportunities and blue collar jobs while I went on to higher education and a professional career. Now, I have little in common with them, and reunions are very difficult and uncomfortable because I am working so hard to try to "fit in" again and can't. I wonder how we could have spent so much time together as children, and now not be able to share a dinner for lack of conversational fodder. And, I feel guilt at how so many have struggled in life. Julia seems to be developing similar feelings as she sees the opportunities life has presented her but which life has not presented her friend, Cassie.

That said, I was profoundly disappointed in the ending to this book. Obviously, in life, we do lose contact with people we knew when we were young. But I thought that at least we'd get some of our questions answered about what happened to Cassie from middle school on at home. To have made Cassie's disappearances so dramatic, I expected a more satisfying ending. Spoiler alert: Making Cassie into a nameless but brainwashed zhombie under her mother's control was just not what I was looking for in the ending. She deserved to be fleshed out much better than that. Even if the book focuses on Julia's realization that parts of those around her are unknowable, in general, one knows a little more than that her former friend no longer comes up in a google search.

Some long-term friendships endure and others dissolve. Claire Messud explores the friendship between Julia and Cassie in a novel titled, The Burning Girl. Following a summer during which the adolescent girls were inseparable, they return to school and drift apart. Using finely written prose, vividly descriptive language and mood setting narrative, Messud explores this change and the ways in which secrets and what is not known can be what is essential. The novel explores alienation and does so with great skill.

Rating: Four-star (I like it)

This is properly a YA novel. The protagonists are teens and their story is a teen-oriented one. This is a lovely snapshot of a friendship in transition as two young women grow up. One is grounded and stable, with a healthy family life. The other is a bit of a mess. Friendships grow and change, whether we like it or not, and this book does a beautiful job of portraying one of the many ways that can happen and the emotional impact it has.

An eloquent portrayal of adolescent girls and the power and nature of storytelling. What doesn't happen (the predictable story arc of novels with a young female protagonist) is as important as what does happen. It's not just a great story; the telling of it captures the myriad of influences that shape our lives. The world Cassie and Julia navigate reflects so many of the current issues women are negotiating. But it never feels heavy-handed or contrived. I can't stop thinking about it. This book will stay with me for a long time.

An unusually compelling and well-written coming-of-age story for two contemporary teenage girls in New England. It takes a good bit of talent for an author to create a riveting story from a believable real-life type situation. Messud has the ability to lead the reader to expect the absolute worst, then surprises with something different and unanticipated.

I really enjoyed this book. Interesting story, well developed characters, and the ending was just right. Excellent writing, too. I felt transported to another time and place and didn't want to put the book down. This is my first Claire Messud novel and I eagerly look forward to reading other books by this talented writer.

This short novel was a great read. I was reminded of my best friends from childhood and the horrible pains on middle school. I found many things about the protagonist, Julia, that reminded me of myself at that age. The end left unanswered questions, but there are similar loose ends in the stories of my lost friends from childhood.

Enjoyable, well written and really good understanding of the all encompassing aspect of the early childhood best friend, where they are your alter ego and together you seem almost larger than whole. Loved it.

The first half was really good, I enjoyed the tales of the two best friends and the things they enjoyed doing together. Then it got dark and depressing when Cassie started having issues and shutting Julia out. It turned a corner in the last half and became boring and dragged on.

I really enjoyed reading about the dynamics in the relationship between these two girls who have been friends forever. Experiencing your first best friend is an important part of childhood and it was fun to compare the book's story with my personal one.

I was very intrigued with this book. The story of Cassie and Julia's childhood friendship disintegrating during adolescence was good. I just felt that Cassie's story was unfinished. It was a bummer to not know what really happened to her.

The story itself was so unpredictable. I didn't want to stop reading because I was so intrigued by the well developed characters and wanted to learn more about what led to the events, minor and major.

Very disappointed in this novel. There was an undertone that the character Julie with two parents in the home, more refined lifestyle was better than Cassie who had a much more difficult upbringing. I felt very sorry for Cassie so desperate trying to find her father and get out of her situation. The ending was very sad as well with Cassie's so called friends making up terrible stories of Cassie and her mother after they moved away. Who needs friends like that! Also the ending seemed so unfinished and flat with Julie's aspirations of making a film about the Cassie. Wish I never bothered reading this book.

Brilliant and provocative. I think in everyone's life, there's a troubled friend that we're powerless to help. Messud made me remember the troubled friend in my life. Lovely writing and a quiet but heartbreaking story.

Like a few of the other reviewers, I kept reading this book waiting for something to happen. I was halfway through and continued reading thinking surely something will happen now, but really not much happened. I would have been disappointed if I would have paid for this book, I rented it from my library.

Beautiful, realistic, intense prose. This is a potent character-driven novel, and the characters are quite life-like. The ending falls flat for me, however, and none of the mysteries that were set up throughout the book are answered/resolved. I also feel like the "messages" readers are supposed to take away from this story are too heavy-handed/forced.

I was anxious to read this book, not only because it was my first Claire Messud novel, but also because of the positive advance buzz it was receiving. At about 100 or so pages in, I kept wondering when all of this underwhelming storytelling was going to finally coalesce into an engaging narrative. It never did. This book is, as others have pointed out, a failed attempt at a YA novel, masquerading as serious literary fiction.
The lead characters, Julia and Cassie, are good girl/bad girl stereotypes. Julia (the achiever from a nice home, with good grades and college aspirations) muses about her life in the most mundane ways. Cassie (the rebel from a broken home, a runaway, who’s rumored to have been the lone girl in the boy’s locker-room) is a pastiche of those B-movie bad girl tropes. Disheartened by the author trafficking in these pedestrian and stereotypical female cliches, I should have given up. Instead, I read on.
The ‘dream-meets-reality’ denouement that awaits the reader is a failed and rather silly attempt by the author to stir interest in a tedious book as it gasps out its last breath.
I would have been more engaged with the story if the author had demonstrated more skill and craft in illuminating the lives of the central (and minor) characters. But that never happened. They remained cynically-sketched cliches until the very end.
The only feeling I experienced in the final pages of The Burning Girl was relief at no longer having to spend time with these sad people who deserved so much more from their author.

Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl is a coming of age tale that grapples with the complexities of friendship and identity. Best friends Julia and Cassie are inseparable until childhood begins to blur into adolescence. In the divisive world of middle school, different schedules and social groups continue to pull the girls apart, though they still maintain a tenuous friendship.

During this time of transition and turmoil, Julia also watches her friend face another hurdle: Dr. Anders Shute, Cassie’s mother’s authoritative boyfriend. Although Cassie claims that Dr. Shute has an unhealthy obsession with her, Julia is torn between believing Cassie and mistrusting her theatrics. Dr. Shute’s dark character heightens Julia’s awareness of their vulnerability as young women.

“You start to grow up and you learn from all the stories around you what the world is like, and you start to lose freedoms. Not because anybody actually tells you that you’ve lost them, but because you know you need to take care. Without a friend beside you, no biking on the Audubon Trail, no swimming at the quarry, no hiking in the woods. Beware darkness, isolation, the outdoors, unlocked windows, men you don’t know. And then you realize too that even men you do know, or thought you knew, might not be okay.”

Messud skillfully withholds information throughout the text, and this is especially true in the case of Dr. Shute. His relatively innocuous introduction in the beginning of the novel (the girls joke about his name and make fun of his awkward characteristics) plants doubt in our minds. Is he truly sinister, or are Julia and Cassie jumping to conclusions, applying the dramatic storylines of their childhood games to real life?

Even if we are unsure of Dr. Shute’s true motives and moral character, we are sure that Cassie resents the wedge he has driven between her and her mother. Here, just as she does at other points in the novel, Messud explores what happens when bonds that should be unbreakable are broken. Cassie is left reeling, wondering if everything she’s ever known has been a lie.

When Cassie disappears, Julia realizes that she knows even less about her former best friend than she’d thought. Cassie’s physical absence forces Julia to relive the loss of their friendship all over again, and the uncertainty surrounding Cassie’s disappearance intensifies Julia’s apprehension of an increasingly terrifying, unknowable world.

I only really began to appreciate this book when I began reading it as a YA novel (the first person narrator is a teen at the time of writing it so that should have been indicative of the target demography – not mine! – this understanding actually ended up freeing me up to enjoy the novel!) It’s a love song to girlhood, to the difficulties of letting go of childhood and being forced to embrace the complex convoluted aspect of becoming an adult. Messud explores the bittersweet limbo where friends still inspire and form us even when they distance themselves and become mysterious to us.

It is written simply and yet you sense that the author has invested deeply in this novel emotionally (the details feel personal, mainly because they seem superfluous most of the time). There is a lot of dialogue and the second half of the novel is generally put together through hearsay and the narrator’s imagination. It is a novel about childhood female friendship and how the fragility of friendships unravel in spite of fierce loyalty. The narrator, Julia, is privileged, she is an only child to attentive, caring middle class parents who support all her choices and help her grow up to be considerate and balanced. Her best friend Cassie comes from a fraught family situation and spends a lot of the time alone since her single mother works. Her lack of prospects seem to form her so that by middle school the girls turn inwards and outwardly adapt to what society expects them to be/become. In truth I found this a rather simplistic (and slightly moralistic) vision of adolescence and that message about the importance of a loving, balanced, family life.

There are echoes of Elena Ferrante’s first Napoletean book ‘My brilliant friend’ – albeit set in contemporary America, not mid fifties Italy. Cassie is consistently described as attracting attention (everyone seems to be in love with her, much like Lila in Ferrante’s book – Cassie’s white shiny hair, her scrawniness, her mysteriousness and remoteness are magnets). Like Ferrante’s book this novel also begins by alluding to a disappearance and then there is also that same sort of love triangle with the same boy.

In spite of my misgivings I do find Messud a talented storyteller; she very effectively evokes the discomfort, mystery and threat that lie under the surface with Cassie’s home life with Anders Shute; ‘The Burning Girl’ grabs your attention and makes it difficult to stop reading.

I usually enjoy books written by women that reflect the nuanced female experience- and the professional reviews said this was such a book, a book that captures the inner lives of young girls as they come of age in the world.

NOPE, it did none of that. It was boring, slow paced and uninteresting as far interior monologues go. I skipped parts and barely managed to hang on until I was 3/4 of the way through the book and then I was so annoyed and so disappointed I just quit reading. It was my own private protest. The book did have a bit of suspense by that point but it felt false and silly to me. I refused to honor the premise of this charade any longer. I closed the book and moved on. There are too many great authors out there to waste my time on this silliness.

I very much enjoyed the tale of the friendship of Julia and Cassie and the changes that their relationship endured, or didn't, as time passed. Rings true to many young relationships, and how time and life changes them.

The world needs more complex female characters, more stories of complicated, fraught friendships, more short novels that do everything long bloated ones do, more books like this that I couldn’t put down and loved so much.