Girls on Fire

By: Robin Wasserman

Narrated by: Vanessa Labrie, Lauren Saunders

This is not a cautionary tale about too much - or the wrong kind of - f**king. This is not a story of bad things happening to bad girls. I say this because I know you, Dex, and I know how you think. I'm going to tell you a story, and this time it will be the truth.

Hannah Dexter is a nobody, ridiculed at school by golden girl Nikki Drummond and bored at home. But in their junior year of high school, Nikki's boyfriend walks into the woods and shoots himself.

In the wake of the suicide, Hannah finds herself befriending new girl Lacey, and soon the pair are inseparable, bonded by their shared hatred of Nikki. Lacey transforms good girl Hannah into Dex, a Doc Marten and Kurt Cobain fan who is up for any challenge Lacey throws at her.

The two girls bring their combined wills to bear on the community in which they live; unconcerned by the mounting discomfort that their lust for chaos and rebellion causes the inhabitants of their parochial small town, they think they are invulnerable. But Lacey has a secret about life before her better half, and it's a secret that will change everything....

Starting - and ending - with tragedy, Girls on Fire stands alongside The Virgin Suicides in its brilliant portrayal of female adolescence but with a power and assurance all its own.

©2016 Robin Wasserman (P)2016 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"Like lightning in a bottle, Robin Wasserman's Girls on Fire captures girlhood friendship in all its shattering intensity. Seldom do you find a novel that so transports you to the dark, febrile terrain of adolescence, when intimacy and connection can turn on a dime to something far more dangerous. A captivating, terrifying novel, and one you won't forget." (Megan Abbott)

"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)