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A review by wendoxford
The Burning Girl by Claire Messud
3.0
A novel of female friendship through childhood and adolescence, from joy to pain. It is largely pain-filled writing both in the intensity of the bonding and the unravelling. Some of the essence of teenage years is captured in an understated way describing groups of students at school as well as the domestic settings.
I found it curiously compelling but in a very different way from Messud's other novels. Her other works I found more haunting & more uncomfortable. I wonder if it is the "voice". This reads in the vein of "emotion recollected in tranquillity" and certainly feels like a narrator looking back from a completely different stage of life, not the two years later recollections that introduce the story.
I found it curiously compelling but in a very different way from Messud's other novels. Her other works I found more haunting & more uncomfortable. I wonder if it is the "voice". This reads in the vein of "emotion recollected in tranquillity" and certainly feels like a narrator looking back from a completely different stage of life, not the two years later recollections that introduce the story.