The Burning Girl A Novel [Hardcover]

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.[Messud] is an absolute master storyteller and bafflingly good writer&It is that combination of imagination and skill that makes[A] masterwork of psychological fiction&Messud teases readers with a psychological mystery, withholding information and then cannily parceling it out.Ms. Messud is at her?most incisive?in exploring the volatile transition from childhood to adolescence.Messud is psychologically astute about her characters and about the competing social and familial pressures&that make adolescent friendship and its dissolution so fraught.[Messud] has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives&Long before the recent success of Elena Ferrantes Neapolitan tetralogy, which tells of the complex, often vexed, lifelong friendship between two women, Messud was narrating these stories with an unusual intensityand quietly making a case for womens interiority as a subject worthy of the most serious examination.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.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. Youll know the ones I mean, school classics likeSlim but impactful&[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 olã