Girls on Fire: A Novel

Imagine John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club remade by Quintain Tarantino with a soundtrack by Nirvana instead of Simple Minds & R-rated for nudity, sex, violence & language. That’s how I envision a movie version of Girls on Fire. The setting is “the butt crack of western Pennsylvania”--an imaginary rust-belt town called Battle Creek somewhere near Pittsburgh, Bruce Springsteen country. The plot involves discovering what happened to the high-school athlete Craig Ellison, an apparent suicide by gunshot, & a struggle for the soul of Hannah Dexter, a junior @ the school. Her BF, the grunge-girl wild-child worshipper of Kurt Cobain, Lacey Champlain, wants to turn “Dex” into a goth-girl; their frenemy, teen-princess Nikki Drummond, would transform “Hannah” into a Monongahela Valley Girl.In fiction these days it is the teens who are resourceful & knowledgable & the adults who are helpless & clueless. That is not surprising when the parents themselves think that they are still teenagers, exemplified by Dex’s father Jimmy, whose mid-life crisis he would resolve by restarting his old garage band & fumbling with Lacey in the darkened movie theater where he barely manages to hold down a job. Of course real teenagers are much better @ being teenagers than are 40-somethings.Setting in the early ‘90s is both realistic & somewhat overdone. Battle Creek seems overrun with “Christian” fundamentalists obsessed with Satanism. There was a scare about devil worshippers @ that time, but I think it centered more on day-care facilities than on high schools. I’d prefer to believe that even @ that time & place Hannah would have been recognized & treated as a rape victim rather than as a Satanic bad girl after what happened to her in the aftermath of Nikki’s foreclosure party. Perhaps fortunately, Lacey’s horrible stepfather--“the Bastard”--seemed too OTT as well, tho’ Lacy’s experience @ the “Christian” reform school was wonderfully harrowing, if gratuitous. I felt the author had to pad the narrative, the year that elapses after Craig’s death: the plot needed the economy, concentration & punch that Megan Abbott might have given it. This book needs toning, less sag & tighter story. The ‘90s setting was probably chosen less for the ambience of the period (tho’ we get an allusion to that very middle-aged teenager Bill Clinton) than that Kurt Cobain needed to still be alive.I loved the main characters Dex & Lacey, & even Nikki attracted me despite herself. But I found the very end of the story deflated & boring, as if the author simply gave up instead of devising a conclusion appropriate to the characters, unless like another Hannah, Arendt, Robin Wasserman wanted to portray the banality of evil. Morally tho’, I have reflect a lot more on Dex’s choice. Unlike in The Secret History, here the question of how far you should go for someone you love is much harder to answer. Committing a crime to save a friend & wanting to implicate a friend to share your guilt may be the same legally, but morally they are world’s apart.With Girls on Fire, Robin Wasserman belongs on the level with Megan Abbott, but more the Abbott of Fever than of Dare Me. I intend to read parts of this one again (wonderful to have both Kindle & audio), but probably not all the way through. So five stars--but one’s a bit dim.

Warning: Spoilers ahead.Let me preface this by saying I'm a child of the 90s and loved the grunge scene and Kurt Cobain, and I really, really wanted to like this book. However, I did not. This book wanted to be Gone Girl - but Wasserman isn't able to capture the complexities of a multidimensional character that the reader can root for in spite of their bad behavior. While the two main characters of Gone Girl are difficult to like, one stands out more than the other (by the end of the book), as truly sociopathic (the wife). The husband is definitely a self-absorbed man-child, however, you still can relate to him to a certain extent, and can even have sympathy for him. In this book, there are no likeable characters that anyone can relate to or sympathize with.As a former high school teacher and former teenage girl, I can say that high school girls are difficult to like. Not all of them, but a lot of them. It's okay - it's the time of your life you are allowed to be the worst possible version of yourself. However, there is always good with the bad. The three main characters of this book are just all bad. Hannah has no reason to be so dark and miserable; her parents are mostly happily married and they love her. Yet she hates life and everyone else. Of course we understand why Lacey is on the edge, and at times there is a glimmer of something like sympathy that pops up inside me for her, but on the whole, she turns out to be mostly unlikeable too. Don't get me started on Nikki. Although teenage girls can be self-absorbed drama queens and be mean to one another, I just found a lot of this book to be so far-fetched. If you don't like the main characters, or at least one of them, just a little bit, why do you care what happens to them?And I didn't care, but I kept reading just to find out what happened to Craig. There is so much sex, some drugs and some rock n' roll, and just sooo many unlikeable teens and people. That's what made the book so hard to get through. The author had a great idea, but she didn't manage to pull it off to the extent that you want Lacey or Dex to escape and start a new life; you just don't like either one of them so you just don't care.I wanted to like this book but it fell short. It did kind of turn into more of a young adult book at the end with just a lot of back and forth between the girls and annoying dialogue. And the whole scenario with how Craig died - too over the top.There is a lot of

This was just too much: too much trying hard, too much trying to be different; too much overkill of character, too much bitterness, too much hatred. TOO MUCH. Sure this author knows how to turn a phrase, but it was all too covert, too trying to keep you guessing. I just didn't relate to any of the characters at all. I just found myself bored. I tried so hard to get into it, but all the time I was wishing I was finished with it, so I could at least find out the ending. Boring, boring, boring. And predictable. I thought perhaps there might have been a twist at the end - poacher turned gamekeeper; that might have been a bit more exciting, more thought provoking. I much preferred 'The Girls' by Emma Cline. I got her characters and felt their pain and loved her lyrical writing. Sorry, Robin W is a good writer, her English impeccable, but I won't be reading more of her work. I found it implausible, especially the constant referral to sex and lesbian trios, pretty grim actually.

This book was honestly an effort to read, however I hoped it would get better (it didn't). This received such rave reviews I thought it wasn't to be missed. The book claims to provide an insight into the lives of teenage girls in a relatable way. The main characters were boring and contrived, typical high school 'jocks' and girls trying too hard to be indie. This was personally nothing I could relate to from my teenage years. The storyline was unrealistic and quite frankly cliché. 'Girl gets drunk at party and makes a fool of herself' and 'popular girls in high school are mean' *yawn* I wouldn't bother buying this book. Complete waste of time and money

A stunning piece of writing from start to finish.Absolutely engrossing,enthralling and addictive.I was compelled to finish it yet at the same time reaching the end felt like something significant had gone from my life.Brilliant.

Genuinely brilliant book. Well written, well described...great pace and intrigue. I procrastinated about finishing other work in favour of reading this, curled up with a cuppa. Rare these days that I find a book that I really 'get into'.Loved it!! Another please!!

Great read