A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist "[A] masterwork of psychological fiction.... Messud teases readers with a psychological mystery, withholding information and then cannily parceling it out." -Chicago Tribune

"The friendship of two girls, Julia and Cassie, animates this slim, dreamlike novel.... Messud plays, lightly, with familiar archetypes, deftly abstracting her tale so that it flares into myth." -- The New Yorker"[Messud] is an absolute master storyteller and bafflingly good writer.... It is that combination of imagination and skill that makes The Burning Girl exceptional.... It amplifies that subtle, piercing shift between Cassie and Julia, made brighter by passages of sheer splendorous prose." -- Los Angeles Times"Breathtaking.... With this novel, Messud brings her own particular brand of astuteness and emotional intelligence through her careful and thoughtful prose." -- San Francisco Chronicle"Messud is at her most incisive in exploring the volatile transition from childhood to adolescence." -- Wall Street Journal"[Messud] has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives... and quietly making a case for women's interiority as a subject worthy of the most serious examination." -- Ruth Franklin - New York Times Magazine"Messud captures young adolescence vividly and unjudgmentally.... Messud is a storyteller: the ability to compel and hold the reader's interest may not be the crown and summit of novel writing, but it's the beginning and end of it.... [T]he story rewards the reader right through to the end." -- Ursula K. Le Guin - Guardian"Slim but impactful.... The Burning Girl asks how well we can ever know our closest confidants and answers its own question with every refined page." -- Vanity Fair"Claire Messud nails it... with The Burning Girl, a hypnotic coming-of-age novel about two small-town Massachusetts best friends, who grow up with strikingly different outcomes." -- Elle"Messud is psychologically astute about her characters and about the competing social and familial pressures... that make adolescent friendship and its dissolution so fraught." -- Boston Globe"The kind of book more common in the middle of the twentieth century than it is today.... Like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye... The Burning Girl has a more sophisticated structure, in its unobtrusive handling of the relation between its narrative voice and Julia's younger self, and its moral complexities seem greater too." -- Michael Gorra - New York Review of Books