Julia and Cassie have been friends forever since childhood, but as they get older things happen and this could break their friendship. This sounded fabulous and intriguing but it wasn’t the one for me.

I found this book completely absorbing and wrote a very positive review in Cosmpolitan at the time it came out, At this point I didn't understand I had to also post it on here. I don't think writing a review now will be helpful to the publisher or author but would like to register that I enjoyed the book.

I must admit that I didn't read this when I initially downloaded it. However, I've recently been going through a phase of reading folklore related books. This was very enjoyable.

I am in charge of our Senior School library and now during this time of lockdown, I am looking for a diverse array of new books to furnish their shelves with and inspire our young people to read a wider and more diverse range of books as they move through the senior school. It is hard sometimes to find books that will grab the attention of young people as their time is short and we are competing against technology and online entertainments.
This was a thought-provoking and well-written read that will appeal to readers across the board. It had a really strong voice and a compelling narrative that I think would capture their attention and draw them in. It kept me engrossed and I think that it's so important that the books that we purchase for both our young people and our staff are appealing to as broad a range of readers as possible - as well as providing them with something a little 'different' that they might not have come across in school libraries before.
This was a really enjoyable read and I will definitely be purchasing a copy for school so that our young people can enjoy it for themselves. A satisfying and well-crafted read that I keep thinking about long after closing its final page - and that definitely makes it a must-buy for me!

I loved The Woman Upstairs but this one didn't work for me. The narration is off, it's supposed to be a teenage girl telling her story but she speaks like, er, an articulate and reflective literary novelist. Might have worked if the character was looking back through the decades, then she could convincingly have been knowledgeable about how the architectural styles of local properties reflect economic and social change etc...

I was intrigued by the synopsis of The Burning Girl by Claire Messud. A story of two best friends who have been joined at the hip their whole lives only for one of them to start wandering down a path full of danger and darkness. I think one thing that drew me to it was the idea of childhood friends drifting apart as this is something that I can fully relate to. I was expecting it to be an emotional exploration of the perils of growing up.

The Burning Girl follows Julia and Cassie, who have been best friends since they were children. They’ve gone to school together, volunteered at an animal shelter together and shared long hazy summers together. However, as they reach their teenage years, Cassie starts to distance herself from Julia. Cassie starts hanging out with the popular crowd and dating Peter, who she knows Julia has always liked. But Cassie’s home life is in tumult causing her to descend into depression and trouble. Julia courageously puts aside her frustrations to try and save their friendship -and Cassie- from imploding completely.

There are some lovely quotes in The Burning Girl. Messud’s writing style is very reflective and has a warm tinge of nostalgia at the edges. It is a little repetitive at times and I did feel that she was labouring the same points over and over, as the story progressed. I would have liked to have seen a little more substance rather than such a close focus on Julia and Cassie’s ever-changing relationship.

The exploration of growing up and learning that so much of adult life is complicated is very literal and at times, the metaphors are very obvious. It could have done with a little more mystery and lyricality embedded in the language. Having said that, I did like how Julia seemed to pick up on things that the average person doesn’t. She questions everything and often still doesn’t come to a conclusion, which makes her very realistic and conflicted as so many people -particularly teenagers- are.

I loved the frank manner that Julia has, when she’s rambling about the difficulties of growing up female. How girls are taught to be fearful and careful with almost everything in their lives. There is a lot of valuable truth in some of what she says. The book also prompts some questions about the true state of Cassie’s home life. There are hints that something darker than what is revealed might be going on and although, we never find out for sure her dramatic reactions suggest some hidden secret.

As the book comes to an end, we get the sense that Julia has developed from a young girl who is enamoured with her burning spark of a best friend to a well-rounded, kind-hearted young woman with a more level head. Both girls seem to be heart-thinkers, which leads them down some dangerous slippery paths but the book depicted an accurate transition from this reckless behaviour to a more logical and sensible manner. I was left with the idea that you can love fiercely but you should always look out for yourself above all.

I definitely wanted more excitement and eventfulness from The Burning Girl. It was a lovely obvious coming-of-age story but it was quite dense to get through, despite it being quite a short book. I liked Messud’s ideas but felt that it could have been executed a little better. Perhaps some more drama or a twist or two thrown in there?

“You’d think it wouldn’t bother me now. The Burneses moved away long ago. Two years have passed.”

It’s always a pleasurable feeling to begin a novel when the writer is as sure footed and smart as Messud – a whole story lays promisingly ahead.

Julie and Cassie are unlikely best friends. (Unlikely because of their differing backgrounds — where Julia is from an economically and emotionally stable family, mum a journalist, dad a dentist, both encouraging and nurturing, Cassie’s father died before she knew him and her mum is an overweight, overworked hospice nurse with a religious bent.) Messud does a wonderful job of conjuring the intensity of female adolescent friendships. The girls are inseparable, Julie somewhat in thrall to Cassie whose white blonde hair and spirit of adventure entrance her. They spend time together on the cusp of teen changes, exploring the countryside, drinking hot chocolate, painting each other’s nails and dreaming of leaving town. As is so often the way, there is a cooling of affections; Cassie befriending a new girl, Julie hurt and bitter, and although both girls pretend their relationship is just as friendly, it never recovers. Julie tells us, “My mother assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later, for reasons more or less identifiable; everyone loses a best friend at some point. Not in the ‘she moved to Tucson’ sense, but in the sense that ‘we grew apart’”

I remember it happened to me, more than once, and can still recall the crushing loss of who I was as part of that friendship. How accurate this seems, “I had other friends, but I’d lost the friend I loved best, and had loved without thinking for as long as I could remember, and it seemed absolutely essential not to appear to care.” Oh the times I appeared not to care!

Cassie dates Peter, the boy that Julie likes, and further distances herself, but it’s when her mum starts unexpectedly dating Dr Anders Shute, a man who has “… pale, pale skin and protruding cheekbones like a death’s head” — a man who moves into Cassie’s home and uses his new found religious zeal to reprimand her for everything and anything, that Cassie begins to disappear from Julie’s life.

Messud plays with reader expectations, after all we are well versed in tropes about religious stepdads and rebellious girls, about pretty teens from disadvantaged backgrounds who sneak out to drink with boys. Unlike Julie, nobody is expecting Cassie to achieve. Her story isn’t told directly but is reflected to us through Julie’s imagination, her assumption of knowledge, filling in gaps with information from Peter and snippets of gossip her dad has heard. It may feel a little unsatisfactory to not be dealing with definite’s but it certainly seems organic, in the way the neighbourhood stories we hear are.

“Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Not paranoid, exactly, but always alert and aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theatre or the fire escape in a hotel. You came to know, in a way you hadn’t as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified. On TV, in the papers, in books and movies, it isn’t ever the men being raped or kidnapped or bludgeoned or dismembered or burned with acid. But in stories and crime shows and TV series and movies, and in life too, it’s going on all around you. So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs protecting. It’s both precious and totally dispensable depending on whom you encounter. You don’t want to end up at a party not knowing how to get home. You don’t want to end up walking down a street—especially a quiet street—by yourself at night. You don’t want to open your door to a strange man at all, really, ever, if you’re alone, even if he’s wearing a uniform. Because his uniform could be a disguise. It happens. I’ve seen it on TV.

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 tells you that you’ve lost them, but because you know you need to take care.”

While the voice may sound more like that of an adult than the still young Julie, it’s sad and depressing and rings with truth – it feels like the heart of the book.

Messud’s novel may not have set the literary world alight, but it’s a thoughtful, quiet and typically intelligent story which I thoroughly enjoyed.

This was the first book I've read from this author and it was just okay. It was hard for me to get into and the characters didn't keep my attention.

I’m hugely conflicted about this novel and swung several times between irritated and impressed. The foreshadowing is heavy-handed and seems to reduce rather than build the tension at the beginning but then the plot took hold of me and I was definitely curious. It’s a shame that the climax was ruined by a trite and unsophisticated plot device. I hate revelatory dreams used in this way, particularly when they appear so fortuitously and without precedent in a narrative. It smacks as an easy way to an otherwise unlikely event and is frankly lazy writing.

The story revolves around the intense friendship of Julia and Cassie, young girls friends from their earliest years despite the stark contrast in their family circumstances. It’s not a new tale and the bonds between the two girls are strained by conflict, adolescence and society. The voice of the narrator Julia jars. She’s supposed to be very young but her narration and her thoughts are those of a much older woman.

There are some powerful passages about female vulnerability, especially on biased judgement and vicious rumour but these lay a little awkwardly with the story, as if they were either an afterthought tagged on or as if the story struggled to accommodate them. The same was true of some of the musings on the nature of stories and reality in defining a person’s identity. Overall, an uneven and quite frustrating novel.

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud is a complex YA novel about the mercurial nature of friendship – especially for those who are growing up. The story follows Julia and Cassie as we watch their friendship gain momentum and gradually fall apart.

With the hindsight of adulthood, it is easy to see that friendships evolve and some burn out naturally, others implode in big drama but not matter what age it happens it still hurts. I really felt for the character of Julia – she felt so lost without her best friend, her constant. I have been in that situation so it was easy to empathise. Equally, it was easy to see the frailty of their relationship – things that maybe shouldn’t be an issue but sometimes can be such as socioeconomic situations or lack of strong role models.

I will admit that at times I did find the narrative of The Burning Girl a little slow paced but overall the story was well written.

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud is available now.

For more information regarding Little Brown (@LittleBrownUK) please visit www.littlebrown.co.uk.

‘The Burning Girl’ is a vivid and sensitive portrayal of an intense childhood friendship, the memories of which resonate long after the relationship breaks down. Claire Messud captures brilliantly the pre-adolescent summer holiday adventuring, gossiping and merely ‘hanging out’ enjoyed by Julia, the narrator of the story, and Cassie, her luminous friend. They swim, bake, make up stories and games, all quite unselfconsciously, little imagining that when adolescence arrives the sisterly closeness will fade away. Julia is bright; Cassie is not academic. Julia’s parents are portrayed as reasonable, loving, kind and forgiving; Bev, Cassie’s mother, is far more intense in her parenting, struggling as a single parent and clearly relieved when she catches the eye of a local doctor, Anders Shute, who eventually moves in.
The second section of the novel reveals Cassie’s troubles from a distance, still from Julia’s viewpoint, often after discussing the situation with Peter, Cassie’s perfectly nice one-time boyfriend, now banished by Bev and Anders who grow increasingly restrictive and punitive. Who is the real Cassie? Is she the ‘slut’ bitched about at school? Is she the disobedient daughter? Or is she the girl feeling increasingly lost and despairing, abandoned by her clever friend?
By her own admission, Julia loves to tell stories. How reliable a narrator is she? How hurt has she been by Cassie’s challenging behaviour? The author allows us to glimpse Julia putting a spin on her narrative in which she is almost always presented as mature, considerate and, at times, even heroic. Indeed, her only constant vulnerability is her concern about her appearance. She regularly refers to her lumpen appearance in contrast to Cassie’s delicate beauty and this makes her seem a little more ‘real’ – like many teenagers she is overly critical of her body.
This is a subtly written portrayal of why a young person might crumble in the way that Cassie eventually does. Whilst there is no dramatic revelation of sexual abuse, for example, the reasons why the ‘burning girl’ fizzles out are just as hard-hitting, perhaps, ironically, because they are so mundane. The novel’s conclusion does not lead the reader to imagine that Cassie’s youthful spark will be easily reignited. It also reminds us that life isn’t fair. Not everything can be mended neatly, much as Julia would like to believe. Messud’s carefully crafted story highlights the disparities between the girls, even as Julia announces their sisterhood.
My thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown Book Group for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

This is the story of two girls Julie and Cassie who are friends from the early age of nursery. Julie has a nice house with two parents and Cassie has a single Mum not sure who her Dad is a bit like chalk and cheese. As the go into adolescence they grow apart. I’m sure many people can think back and those first young friends have probably disappeared from their lives as they’ve got older.

This is story about the friendship between two girls and how that changes once they reach adolescence. It's a very emotionally charged book, with the heightened feelings of teenagers well written. It felt very intense and dark at times. The characters were portrayed realistically, not just the two central girls, but the adults around them.

I think this book doesn't know what it wants to be...

It's not quite literary fiction; the protagonist is not removed enough from the events she's looking back on. She's 17, telling the story of a friendship that started falling apart when she was 13. It's not a point of view that lends itself to complex storytelling.

Yet it's not really YA either. For it to be a compelling YA coming of age story, there's not enough drama and immediacy of emotion.

This is not a bad book! Not at all! It simply lacks a few things that would've made it a great one.
The way it is, it's just okay.

I am unable to review this book since I found myself unable to finish it. Although I was very interested in the book initially, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I was expecting. I have given it a three star average here but will not be writing reviews elsewhere since I did not finish it and my opinions would therefore maybe be inaccurate or misleading to other readers. My apologies but thank you for the opportunity to read this book.

I could review this book in one word: disappointing. I was really hopeful that it would be great, based on the blurb – but it just meandered about and tailed off at the end. Let me explain…

The story starts off quite promisingly. Juju and Cassie have been BFF’s all through their childhood, but as they get older they start to drift apart. They have one final summer together where they discover a creepy old derelict mansion in the woods and spend their days playing in it before they go back to school and start to make different friends. So far so good. Usually I would expect something to happen at this point – they take their new friends back to the mansion, something is discovered etc. etc. However, nope – just quite a lot about how the girls are drifting apart. The introduction of the weird doctor Anders Shute made me think that something was going to happen – was he abusing Cassie and/or her Mum? But again, no, nothing is revealed. Eventually, Cassie runs off and finally… no, nothing really happens with that either. The end.

Sigh.

I think my disappointment stems from the fact that I thought I’d really relate to the characters in the book. I’ve had friendships fall by the wayside almost too many times to count and its not often that you see this represented well as a central theme in a novel. You often get the “we used to be best friends and now she’s bullying me” trope, or perhaps the “I’ve been totally ditched for the cool new girl” scenario but the gentle decline of two people growing up in different directions seems to be pretty rare. Or at least, I haven’t often come across it (but then I don’t read a lot of YA). Therefore, I was really looking forwards to seeing how the novel would treat the girls’ friendship. However, apart from a couple of awkward situations where the parents thought the girls were much better friends than they actually were, and the ending where Juju worked something out about Cassie before anyone else, the majority of the book was just… nothingy. I didn’t really relate to Cassie (who I didn’t much like) or Juju (who was kind of boring) and having two teenagers who interacted with each other less and less didn’t really make for a good story.

I did enjoy the introduction of Anders Shute and the sense of foreboding that came with him. I loved how well observed his behaviour was, as he never actually does anything too weird – but you still know there’s something really off about him. I would have liked it if more had been written about his relationship with Cassie, or if there was some huge revelation about him – but no.

Sigh.

By 3/4 of the way through the book I was starting to get properly bored, but hurrah – there’s a bit of action when Cassie makes a discovery and runs off. I thought it was really weird to have the main thrust of the story happen right at the end but I did enjoy this part of the novel, although I thought it was fairly obvious where she had gone.

By the end, I wasn’t really bothered what happened to Cassie, so everything fell a bit flat.

Meh.

Overall, this isn’t a terrible book – some parts are really well written, some characters are well observed and there’s nothing really annoying about it. However, for me there wasn’t enough action and I hated how there were lots of little storylines that went nowhere. The whole thing was pretty forgettable, really.

I loved the first-person narration of this novel. Julia’s description of the years of her friendship with, and later estrangement from Cassie felt realistic and immediate. The girls experience things most of us are familiar with while growing up, that sense of discovering who we are and how we can choose to fit in but there is a real haunting quality to Messud’s writing which gives extra resonance.

Enjoyed this book with its teenage cast. We see through the eyes of a teenager growing up and dealing with a variety of issues; friendships, boys, school, family and although the ending might not be what we wanted, it works perfectly. Really well done.

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.

Julia and Cassie have been friends from an early age even though they come from very different backgrounds. Julia has a stable family and they support her with her ambitions, Cassie lives with her widowed mother. As the girls grow older they grow apart. Cassie becomes increasingly rebellious and takes risks, Julia conforms but wishes she and Cassie were still close. When Cassie disappears after discovering a family secret Julia finds her but suffers as well.

This is a very powerful novel which doesn't seem to be so as one reads it. The writing is simple, the narrative does not appear too complex or deep and the reader skips through the book at a good pace. However the last few pages really start one thinking and a more complex and almost sinister tale emerges. Messud is a confident author who does not waste time or prose on anything other than the bare bones of the story and that is what makes this novel so good.