Description
Book SynopsisA
New York Times Bestseller
A
Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
A bracing, hypnotic coming-of-age story about the bond of best friends, from the
New York Times best-selling author of
The Emperor’s Children.
Trade Review"The friendship of two girls, Julia and Cassie, animates this slim, dreamlike novel…Messud plays, lightly, with familiar archetypes, deftly abstracting her take so that it flares into myth." -- The New Yorker
"[Messud] is an absolute master storyteller and bafflingly good writer…It is that combination of imagination and skill that makes
The Burning Girl exceptional…It amplifies that subtle, piercing shift between Cassie and Julia, made brighter by passages of sheer splendorous prose." -- Rebecca Carroll - Los Angeles Times
"[A] masterwork of psychological fiction…Messud teases readers with a psychological mystery, withholding information and then cannily parceling it out." -- Julia Klein - Chicago Tribune
"Ms. Messud is at her most incisive in exploring the volatile transition from childhood to adolescence." -- Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
"Messud is psychologically astute about her characters and about the competing social and familial pressures…that make adolescent friendship and its dissolution so fraught." -- Boston Globe
"[Messud] has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives…Long before the recent success of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy, which tells of the complex, often vexed, lifelong friendship between two women, Messud was narrating these stories with an unusual intensity—and quietly making a case for women’s interiority as a subject worthy of the most serious examination." -- Ruth Franklin - New York Times Magazine
"Messud is committed to the deep emotional excavation of her characters, revealing and exploring the complex inner impulses that fuel their stories…the author's prose and insights are breathtaking…With this novel, Messud brings her own particular brand of astuteness and emotional intelligence through her careful and thoughtful prose." -- San Francisco Chronicle
"The kind of book more common in the middle of the twentieth century than it is today; novels written for adults in the first-person voice of a child or adolescent but entirely accessible to readers of their protagonists’ age. You’ll know the ones I mean, school classics like
To Kill a Mockingbird and
The Catcher in the Rye…
The Burning Girl has a more sophisticated structure, in its unobtrusive handling of the relation between its narrative voice and Julia’s younger self, and its moral complexities seem greater too." -- Michael Gorra - New York Review of Books
"Slim but impactful…
The Burning Girl asks how well we can ever know our closest confidants and answers its own question with every refined page." -- Vanity Fair
"[An] intense coming-of-age novel. . . . Messud captures the complicated nature of contemporary adolescence through a nuanced portrait of childhood love and loyalty deteriorating under the pressure of approaching adulthood." -- Jane Ciabattari - BBC
