Girls on Fire: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of May 2016: Much will be made of the fact that Robin Wasserman has previously written only Young Adult novels; the heroines (if you can call messed up, Kurt Cobain-obsessed, violent Hannah and Lacey that) of her first adult novel, Girls on Fire, are teenaged high school nonentities who set out to get revenge on the popular kids they re convinced despise them. But make no mistake: Hannah Dexter (also known as Dex, because Lacey thinks that makes her seem tougher) and her friends are involved in some pretty high stakes, grown up (and messed up) stuff, from booze and drugs (of course) to dangerous interactions with sometimes violent older men (ditto) to a climactic scene that even those of us who were blas about those two previous examples didn t see coming. Written in language that can turn from incandescent to overblown, this thrilling novel juxtaposes some pretty terrible behavior with the ordinary goings-on in a completely ordinary town which makes it seem all the more realistic. It s almost embarrassing how firmly it grabbed me, and how grateful it made me both that I don t have any teenage daughters, and that I no longer am one. Sara Nelson