Girls on Fire

by Robin Wasserman

[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.