The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you liked Megan Abbott's "Dare Me" and Tana French's "The Secret Place," you'll love "The Burning Girl." I certainly did. You can tell by the length of this  review.

This is a coming-of-age story (or "bildungsroman," as the Library of Congress' classification system would have it). Two sixth-grade girls spend a summer exploring an abandoned mental asylum in the woods near their town:

"We ventured daily up the grand staircase to long corridors of almost identical rooms, in which torn blinds still dangled at the cracked and smeary windows, or in which sinks encrusted with dessicated black slime hung askew from the walls, their taps useless."

With that delightfully gothic scene as prelude, it's no surprise when one of the girls, Cassie Burnes,  has one problem after another when her mother's strange lover moves into their single-parent household. When that's combined with puberty and adolescent social anxiety, the tension level in the house gets cranked up to unbearable levels.

Messud is a pleasure to read because she has a sure hand in crafting beautifully phrased descriptions of ordinary things without overwriting: 

"The kittens were sisters from the same litter, two tortoiseshells, small enough then to hold in your hand, with tiny white teeth and opalescent claws that dug pulsingly but painlessly into your jeans when you set the creatures on your lap."

 I was also struck by this, early in the book, as the narrator describes her best friend:

"All you had to do was to look into her eyes - still blue eyes that turned gray in dark weather, like the water in the quarry -- and you could see that she was tough. Strong, I guess is a better word. Although in the end, she wasn't strong enough."

As I read that for the first time, I thought: well, what about that quarry? What's going to happen there? And what wasn't she strong enough to handle? I had to find out, and that kept me reading. (Just as a teaser, the quarry is right behind the old mental asylum.)

Don't let those quotes fool you into thinking this is a cozy mystery. Messud takes on some deep issues, but is skilled enough to do so in a way that fits naturally with the plot. Even though the protagonists are mainly adolescents, this is dark, adult stuff, such as: it's hard to know what is true, because we shape our own reality so it makes sense of who we think we are. Whatever choices we think we make, whatever we think we can control, has a life and destiny we cannot fully see.  And finally, referring to a dream in which Cassie puts on a black cloak:

"Now I know, for what little it's worth, what it means to be a girl growing up. Maybe you can choose not to put on the cloak, but then you'll never be free, you'll never soar. Or you can take on the mantle that is given you; but what the consequences may be, what the mantle might do, what wearing it may entail, you can't know beforehand. Others may see better, but they can't save you."

It seems to me that the cloak represents the choices we make and the identity we create for ourselves. And Messud gave Cassie the last name Burnes for a reason: she is the burning girl.

View all my reviews