Girls on Fire

A Novel

By: Robin Wasserman

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell, Simone Lewis, Allyson Ryan

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.

Most Disturbing Book I've Ever Heard

This book reads like a worst case parenting scenario to anyone with daughters. Unsettling and extremely graphic, not for the faint of heart. The story is engaging if you can stomach the language and subject matter.

Raw account of teen girls gone totally wild

A peaceful village is shaken by a mysterious teen suicide. Behind the boy's death there are several stories of bullying, gossip, crimes committed out of boredom, testing the limits of sexual pleasure, intoxication and rebellion against a conservative society.
Until the end we keep wondering who is the puppet and who is the puppeteer? Who is the witch?
How far can go peer influence on teenage girls? Kurt Cobain's life and music are a constant reference where every other religion failed.
Gender issues and uncomfortable questions are raised by daughters and mothers. The first person narration, alternating characters in different chapters, gives a rich contrast of perspectives, exclusively using female voices though. This choices deepens the study of female psyche, but I personally missed the counterpart of fathers and sons.
Certain passages are sublime, while others seem to go too far in a twisted direction, where situations get worse and worse, and become unbelievable.
If you want to go back and feel that teen angst of the 90', if you want to feel female friendship and love, this book is for you, painful but gripping.

Girls on Fire ignites your desire to keep reading!

Where does Girls on Fire rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

This is one of the top audio books I have read. One of the key factors for me in ranking books is the unpredictability of a book. I never saw the ending coming.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Lacey. Without giving too much away, she is epitome of teenage angst.

Have you listened to any of the narrators’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

I have not. They were fantastic and embodied the characters.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Come as you are. Readers/Listeners of the book will understand how appropriate this tag line is.

Any additional comments?

A novel about teenage angst and fighting the desire to fit in. As a teenager who often did not fit in with the popular kids, I found myself rooting for Lacey and Dex and their friendship.

Trying to hard

Trying to hard to seem deep. Didn't love it but it kept my interest enough to finish.

Not my favorite.

This book held promise of 90s nostalgia along with a suspenseful story, but didn't really deliver. I found the story to be very predictable and none of the characters to be particularly interesting. Additionally, three narrators are used, I assume to differentiate point of view. However, the main two voices were so similar (and grating) that it did little to move that idea forward. I was disappointed.