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Robin Wasserman

Girls on Fire

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An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year
On Halloween, 1991, a popular high school basketball star ventures into the woods near Battle Creek, Pennsylvania, and disappears. Three days later, he’s found with a bullet in his head and a gun in his hand—a discovery that sends tremors through this conservative community, already unnerved by growing rumors of Satanic worship in the region.
In the wake of this incident, bright but lonely Hannah Dexter is befriended by Lacey Champlain, a dark-eyed, Cobain-worshiping bad influence in lip gloss and Doc Martens. The charismatic, seductive Lacey forges a fast, intimate bond with the impressionable Dex, making her over in her own image and unleashing a fierce defiance that neither girl expected. But as Lacey gradually lures Dex away from her safe life into a feverish spiral of obsession, rebellion, and ever greater risk, an unwelcome figure appears on the horizon—and Lacey’s secret history collides with Dex’s worst nightmare.
By turns a shocking story of love and violence and an addictive portrait of the intoxication of female friendship, set against the unsettled backdrop of a town gripped by moral panic, Girls on Fire is an unflinching and unforgettable snapshot of girlhood: girls lost and found, girls strong and weak, girls who burn bright and brighter—and some who flicker away.
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370 printed pages
Publication year
2016
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Quotes

  • friends don't liehas quoted7 years ago
    “I can’t believe you have a car,” I said. I didn’t even have a license. “If I had one, I’d drive away and never come back.”
  • friends don't liehas quoted7 years ago
    There was something deliciously numbing about it, the sameness of the clapboard houses and seamed concrete, the day unspooling behind us as we circled the town. I tried to imagine how it looked to her, determinedly idyllic Battle Creek with its antique stores and its ice cream shoppe, its empty storefronts and rusting foreclosure signs, its chest-thumping pride, every forced smile and flapping flag insisting this was the real America, that we were salt of the earth and blood of the heartland, that our flat green corner of Pennsylvania was a walled-off Eden, untouched by the violence and sin endemic to the modern age, that the town mothers worried only over their pie crusts and garden weeds, the town fathers limited themselves to one after-dinner beer and never prowled beneath their secretaries’ skirts, the sons and daughters had only sitcom troubles and, despite their hormones and halter tops, knew enough to wait. When something went awry, when a golden child slipped a gun in his mouth and bled brains on damp earth, it could only be evidence of attack or contagion, an incursion of them, never a fault line through the heart of us. When night came, it was easy to ignore the things the children did in the dark.
    It was impossible, seeing home through her eyes, like seeing your own face as a stranger would. This was my greatest fear, that Battle Creek was my mirror.
  • friends don't liehas quoted7 years ago
    Lacey was a driver—I would come to understand that. She was always inventing field trips for us: We drove to a UFO landing site, a Democratic rally where we pretended to be Ross Perot groupies and a Republican rally where we pretended to be Communists, a sixties-style drive-in with roller-skating ushers, and the Big Mac Museum, which was lame. They were, more than anything, excuses to drive. That first day, she invented no destination; we drove in circles. Motion was enough.

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