GIRLS ON FIRE
Robin Wasserman
Hachette
By JESSIE NEILSON
Robin Wasserman was raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia and studied physics at Harvard. She has written series for young adults, and this is her first novel aimed at a broader adult readership.
Girls on Fire is a speedy bullet of a novel, based somewhat, as we hear terrifyingly, on the author's own experiences as a young woman growing up in anonymous small-town or residential America and involved in intense, destructive female friendships.
Dex and Lacey attend high school in the dismal Battle Creek, which they consider, typically crudely, as the "butt crack of western Pennsylvania'' with its vacant storefronts and rusting foreclosure signs.
This description is exemplary of the schoolgirls' attitude to life, scathing and irreverent as they are of any kind of authority and of most other people surrounding them.
Lacey is a wannabe grunge queen, darkly attired, made-up, sassy, and worshipping of Kurt Cobain. With a Metallica concert-attending mother, a woman who employs a "flexible definition of waitressing'', Lacey Champlain has a "stripper's name and a trucker's wardrobe''. It is 1991.
She meets Hannah Dexter, thereby transforming the latter into the more hip-sounding Dex.
Individually, we learn, they are nobodies, but together they become "radioactive'' with ultimate plans to go out on a high note.
Within the limited teen pool of Battle Creek, and within their high school in particular, are tight cliques demanding proof of loyalty.
These centre around Nikki Drummond, a "spit-shined princess'', and her boyfriend, Craig.
With nothing better to occupy their time, Dex, in hostile co-dependence, loathes Nikki in "concrete particulars that Lacey was eager to help me parse''.
This seems a typical set-up, indeed, as American teen dramas are forever emphasising.
Soon, however, the pressure is amped up all round as wave upon wave of destructive energy overtakes the town, leading to suicide, manipulation and acts of violence radiating out of an attraction, in the students' boredom, to satanic cults and sensationalism.
Not surprisingly the adults of the town are horrified by these miscreants, leading a guest speaker to declare, ominously, that "something was wrong with the children''.
This book is grotesque, and confrontational. Individuals transform themselves intentionally or not; the suicide victim altered by death from a "meathead'' into a "martyr'', and those in life from invisibility to being gratuitously visible and obnoxious.
Confessional in tone the main characters cannot help but re-create themselves as one morbid form or another.
Wasserman has put together a tight and compelling portrayal of the damage that can be caused by complete self-obsession, peer pressure and herd mentality.
While the ideal reader would likewise be a young woman, this book would be fascinating to many in its fixation on a world of elusive yet ordinary villains who completely lack any empathy.
While it claims not to be a morality tale it is no shame to wager that it is, for it leaves a dense, dark impression of situations that one would never wish on anybody.
- Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.
