The Burning Girl

The Burning Girl is a work of literary fiction by Claire Messud, detailing the adventure of protagonists Cassie and Julia as they experience the pains of growing up and growing apart. The first part of the novel chronicles their early friendship and the eventual dissolution of that friendship; later the focus moves to Cassie, who suffers from family traumas and goes to find her father, a man she presumed to be dead but who she believes is living under a false name a few states over.

The novel begins in the small town of Royston, Massachusetts, a community that main characters Cassie and Julia feel is stifling, limiting, and generally a bore. The girls are eleven and have been friends since preschool, where they formed a fast bond. Now, moving into adolescence, the girls are haunted by the expectations that have been put on them – to learn and live and love a certain way. Even at eleven, the girls feel pressure, coupled with deep-seated boredom that drives them into a fantasy world of their own making.

The setting for this fantasy world is a unique one – the girls frequently play in the ruins of a mental hospital for women, which closed decades before and now stands isolated in the New England hills. Their year together is spent in this haunted place, where they play and run and remember the ghosts of troubled women who came before them; women who, like them, were trapped in a place they felt they didn't belong.



By twelve years old, the girls have lost even that ruin as a playground, and with it their fantasies of another world. Instead, those ideas have been replaced with obsession and confusion about sex, romance, social class, and their own, morphing bodies. Slowly, they begin to drift apart, as friends do at that age when they realize that their personalities aren't as similar as they once were. Julia and Cassie eventually make friends with other girls, and stop talking to each other – there is no blowout fight, only a slow diffusion of the bond they once had.

Instead of spending time with Julia, Cassie falls in with a group of troublemaking kids, who almost immediately make Cassie feel like she isn't welcome and doesn't belong. At the same time, Cassie's mother, a widow, starts dating a new man. Before this time, Cassie and her mother lived happily together. Cassie was too young to remember her father's death in a car accident, but she does recall how safe she felt when she was around him. After his death, her mother took on the role of friend and confidante more than a savior, and Cassie immediately feels unsafe around her mother and her new beau. Beyond the strangeness of having another person in the house, Cassie's mother's new boyfriend seems to have an eye for young girls, and Cassie is too terrified to tell her mother the truth about the moves he has made on her.

Finally, in desperation, Cassie starts looking for her father. She googles his name and is surprised to find a man a few states over, who has an eerily similar name and is the right age. Desperate for someone to save her from her own painful adolescence, Cassie decides to find this man, convinced that her mother might have been lying all along about her father's death.



The rest of the novel follows Cassie on her journey, via bus, to find her maybe-dead father – and the missing person investigation that begins as soon as she leaves home.

Claire Messud is an author and creative writing professor living in the New England area. She is the author of seven novels; her most well-known work is The Emperor's Children, which was a New York Times Best-seller and long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2006. Her debut novel, When the World Was Steady, was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award in 1999. The Burning Girl is her most recent novel.