Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

This is not a story of bad things happening to bad girls. I say this because I know you, Dex, and I know how you think. I'm going to tell you a story, and this time, it will be the truth. Hannah Dexter is a nobody, ridiculed at school by golden girl Nikki Drummond and bored at home. But in their junior year of high school, Nikki's boyfriend walks into the woods and shoots himself. In the wake of the suicide, Hannah finds herself befriending new girl Lacey and soon the pair are inseparable, bonded by their shared hatred of Nikki. Lacey transforms good girl Hannah into Dex, a Doc Marten and Kurt Cobain fan, who is up for any challenge Lacey throws at her. The two girls bring their combined wills to bear on the community in which they live; unconcerned by the mounting discomfort that their lust for chaos and rebellion causes the inhabitants of their parochial small town, they think they are invulnerable. But Lacey has a secret, about life before her better half, and it's a secret that will change everything ...Starting - and ending - with tragedy, Girls on Fire stands alongside The Virgin Suicides in its brilliant portrayal of female adolescence, but with a power and assurance all its own.

• ISBN10: 1408707101
• ISBN13: 9781408707104
• Publish Date: 5 May 2016
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 20 September 2016
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• Imprint: Little, Brown
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 368
• Language: English

Reviews

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

I like the darkness in this story.

Robin Wasserman is incredibly good at that, and it’s why I like her writing. I’ve yet to read one of her books that make me feel good – there are no happy endings. But they are dark and gritty and filled with characters who are hurt or broken to the point of ugliness. The writing is good, and Girls on Fire is a car crash you can’t look away from.

And this is a complicated one to recommend. Every turn the characters take leads them deeper into the dark. Characters are denied basic help. Parents are selfish, flawed, blind. Everything that happens is to the greatest extreme. There’s a lot of books like this out there, and it comes down to whether you’ve already got your Broken Girls story that you enjoy. It comes down to whether you love the writing style.

Robin Wasserman makes me love the characters, and want to stay far away from them at the same time. Lacey and Nikki and Dex are all different kinds of messes. The more they interact with one another, the worst they become. The more they shatter. The writing is pretty enough to make you feel, but not so pretty that it’s distracting from the shock value of the story itself.

And I wouldn’t say the story itself is surprising. As soon as you meet the girls, you know something horrifying and illegal is going to happen at the end. The midpoint, Lacey’s stint in the ‘Come to Jesus’ camp, was the real indication of how extreme Girls on Fire would get. Hannah Dexter is the clay, and Nikki and Lacey fight to form her in their own images and create a monster.

Storytelling-wise, I think the only things that should have been cut are the POVs of the mothers. I see what Wasserman was trying to do, creating perspective and allowing an outside view on what is otherwise an intense story… but they broke the flow for me and I found the pause frustrating. I liked the flip between Lacey and Dex’s POV, and I think Nikki’s POV could have been interesting as well, particularly because she’s such an unreliable narrator. I’m such a sucker for unreliable narrators – I never quite know what they are thinking and I love that, especially in a suspenseful contemporary like this.

So while I’m not sure I could recommend Girls on Fire in general, it was a good experience listening to something so raw and painful. I don’t know if I’d read it again, just because it’s so heavy, but I’m glad I read it in the first place.

[Leah]

So, this book has a lot of positive reviews, but it also has its fair share of negative reviews, proving that this is very much a Marmite kind of book. I don't really know how I felt about the book. For one, I love toxic friendship novels and this was right up there, but it didn't manage to maintain it's stamina for the whole novel. Not helped by the fact that Lacey just disappears. That's where I lost my focus, and by the time she came back, I was already gone. So it really needed a good chunk of the book taken out, because I just lost interest when Lacey left, because it was like all the air was let out of a balloon.

I wanted to absolutely love this book and up until it became overly religious/dependant on the devil nonsense (and it is nonsense) I just lost interest, because that's just not my cup of tea. It started strongly, but it really lost its way over half way into the novel, which just made me sad, because I wanted to be as passionate about this book as everyone else seems to be. (I fear I'm entering a reading slump. SEND ME HELP.)