GIRLS FIRE - Couverture souple

Three girls went intothe woods; two came out.

It sounds like a joke, or a riddle. But it was only, would ever after be, the rest of our life.

Shortly after Halloween, 1991, the local high-school basketball star is found in the woods near Battle Creek, Pennsylvania, 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-worshipping bad influence. Lacey forges a fast, intimate bond with the impressionable Dex, making her over in her own image—and unleashing a fierce defiance with unexpected and harrowing consequences. By turns a shocking story of love and violence and an addictive portrait of the intoxication of female friendship, Girls on Fire is an incendiary and unforgettable snapshot of girlhood: girls lost and found, girls weak and strong, girls who burn bright and brighter—and girls who flicker away.

Advance Praise for Girls on Fire

“Like lightning in a bottle, Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire captures girlhood friendship in all its shattering intensity. A captivating, terrifying novel, and one you won’t forget.”—Megan Abbott, author of The Fever and Dare Me

“Girls on Fire is a dark, propulsive fever dream of youth and friendship—a piercing vision of what it means to mistake yourself for who you are in someone else’s eyes. I wanted to grab these girls and shake them, sing them lullabies, stop them—but all I could do was keep reading them, relentlessly enthralled by the heat-seeking missile of  Robin Wasserman’s fearless imagination.”—Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and The Gin Closet

“To read Girls on Fire is to live in the place, flesh, and time of this unforgettable tale. Wasserman’s prose is a spell cast over the reader, shockingly full of the terror of truth. This is not a novel you’ll put down after you pick it up, so clear some time. And it’s not a novel you’ll ever forget after you’ve read it—don’t say you weren’t warned. Wasserman is a brilliant writer, and Girls on Fire is a gorgeous gift of a novel.” —Laura Kasischke, author of In a Perfect World and The Raising

“A book so wonderful, so terrible, so nightmarishly compelling that I hardly knew what to say when I finished reading it. Wasserman has wrapped up a love story inside a murder mystery, a promise and a testament inside a confession—and has a title ever been truer? The reader comes away singed.”—Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble and Magic for Beginners

“An enveloping page-turner.” (Associated Press)

“Explores the line where close female friendships can blur into obsession and self-obliteration....At the heart of the dark story is an intoxicating and all-consuming friendship between two teenage girls.” (New York Times)

“An enthralling, gritty, and altogether unpredictable read that holds nothing back.... You will be utterly riveted.” (BuzzFeed)

“Like lightning in a bottle, Robin Wasserman’s GIRLS ON FIRE captures girlhood friendship in all its shattering intensity. A captivating, terrifying novel, and one you won’t forget.” (Megan Abbott)

“A perfectly constructed literary novel... nearly impossible to put down...Wasserman does so many things right... it’s hard to count them all.... Girls on Fire is an inferno - it’s brutally gorgeous, and you know it could explode anytime, but you can’t turn away, even for a second.” (Michael Schaub, NPR.org)

“’She was making fun of me, or she wasn’t. She was like me, or she wasn’t,’ says Hannah, spidey senses already tingling, after her first extended hang-out with Lacey. It’s one of several sharp, spot-on lines about the frailty of teen friendships that Wasserman employs throughout the book.... [Wasserman proves her] own black-magic mettle by conjuring up an era where ill-informed paranoia (and just plain ding-dongness) turned some of the quietest corners of America into fear factories, full of deep-rooted distrust and misspent rage.” (Brian Raferty, Wired)

“A dark, propulsive fever-dream of youth and friendship. I wanted to grab these girls and shake them, sing them lullabies, stop them―but all I could do was keep reading them, relentlessly enthralled by the heat-seeking missile of Robin Wasserman’s fearless imagination.” (Leslie Jamison, author of THE EMPATHY EXAMS and THE GIN CLOSET)

“As intense as adolescence and as dark as a dream.... Girls on Fire is a mystery and a tangled love triangle and a sharp, ruthless thriller, and it’s satisfying and troubling on all these levels.” (Briallen Hopper, Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Deliciously digestible.... [Girls on Fire has] an undeniably dark, voyeuristic appeal: we get to watch universal emotions manifest with extreme outward ferocity.” (Keziah Weir, Elle)

“Part murder mystery, part love story, this page-turner explores the dark side of the all-consuming friendship between a wide-eyed good girl and a grunge-worshipping rebel.” (Cosmopolitan)