Blair's Reviews > Girls on Fire

Stories about teenagers are a tricky thing. Should they always - no matter how dark and depraved - be categorised as young adult fiction, merely by dint of their protagonists' ages? (The controversy over the 18 certificate given to the film The Diary of a Teenage Girl springs to mind.) Like the occasional misidentification of literary novels as thrillers because of the presence of certain themes, the assumption that all books with teenage characters are YA tends to irritate me. But in the case of Girls on Fire, I think that assumption might be the best way to view the book.

This novel is a typical narrative of teenage rebellion in which a 'bad girl', Lacey, leads a 'good girl', Hannah - later rechristened Dex - astray. Of course there are twists in the tale, but many of them are equally predictable in their own way. I don't know quite how to sum it up, genre-wise - maybe I need a shelf for coming-of-age novels, or poisonous one-sided friendships, or just stories about teenage lives. The plot's starting point, the question of why the local school's beloved 'golden boy' committed suicide, is a mystery that's eventually explained, but it is irrelevant for much of the story. Dex and Lacey's bond is more the point. They take turns narrating, in chapters that cast light on different aspects of their characters. Lacey, a hero in Dex's eyes, appears first as manipulative and bitchy, then resolves into a tragic figure; Dex, the 'nobody', appears honest, a victim, and resolves into an unreliable narrator.

Robin Wasserman has previously penned a swathe of YA novels, but Girls on Fire is described on her website as her 'debut novel for adults'; nevertheless, at the time of writing, it has been shelved predominantly as young adult on Goodreads, and it feels far better suited to a teenage reader. Retrospectively, the author's existing backround in YA fiction makes perfect sense - Girls on Fire is positively gleeful about not needing to be PG-rated, piling on the underage sex and endless swearing, violence and gore, orgies and vicious bullying. It's much like Lacey herself - her nonconformist posturing and, later, her devil-worshipper act, the ways in which she tries so hard to be shocking but never quite manages to convince anyone other than a handful of her peers.

That said: Girls on Fire is compelling, occasionally even incandescent. The setting, the sleepy town of Battle Creek, is the most beautifully realised thing about the book; certain places, such as the woods and the lake, are thick with atmosphere. Indeed, the things and objects in the story - the music, the clothes, Lacey's car - are more tangible than the protagonists. It's set in the early 90s, so Lacey's obsession with Nirvana makes Kurt Cobain practically a supporting character, and the 'Satanic panic' of that era provides a backdrop to the plot, heightening local parents' suspicion of Lacey and Dex, turning their grunge makeovers into something deeper and more sinister.

Although I keep on saying I'm trying harder to stop being such a sucker for hype, I fell for the the spiel about this one. 'A mini Thelma & Louise as directed by David Lynch', one early review had it. As my Goodreads and Twitter feeds fill up with rave reviews, I have to give a resounding shrug. It's absolutely fine, but for me, it lacked the originality or power that would really have made it a memorable story. Two stars, on Goodreads, is supposed to mean 'it was okay', and that's how my rating is intended; this is not at all a bad book, just assuredly not a book for me, and my main complaint is that I feel like the marketing campaign duped me into reading a story that really belongs to a younger audience.

If you liked this, you'll also like / If you didn't like this, you might prefer...
- Gillian Flynn's Dark Places (my favourite of Flynn's books) is the very obvious comparison, with many similarities to Girls on Fire, including a truly unflinching portrait of the lives of teens, copious amounts of sex/drugs/violence etc, a small-town setting, and suspected Satanism.
- Things We Have in Common by Tasha Kavanagh also focuses on the obsession a 'nobody' has with a much cooler/more popular girl, although the trajectory of the plot is very different. It's a story I found simultaneously more believable, weirder, and more exciting than this one.
- The Secret Place by Tana French is a compelling adult mystery which nevertheless keeps a close, emotive focus on the friendships and rivalries within a group of teenage girls. French's attempts to ape 2010s teenagers' patterns of speech are hit and miss, but when she talks about their emotions and what they care about most, the magic and horror of being that age, she's so spot on it can make for painful flashbacks.

I received an advance review copy of Girls on Fire from the publisher through NetGalley.