Mots-clés
Claire Messud, Critique de livre, idées de lecture, lecture, Livre, quoi lire, roman, The Burning Girl, W.W. Norton & Company
Les premières phrases
« You’d think it wouldn’t bother me now. The Burneses moved away long ago. Two years have passed. But still, I can’t lie in the sun on the boulders at the quarry’s edge, or dangle my toes in the cold, clear water, or hear the other girls singing, without being aware the whole time that Cassie is gone. And then I want to say something – but you can’t, you know. It’s like she never existed. »
Circonstances de lecture
Parce que j’ai été attirée par la couverture et les premières lignes de ce roman.
Impressions
Si vous aimez l’univers de Nina LaCour, ce livre de Claire Messud devrait vous plaire. « The Burning Girl » traite de l’amitié entre deux adolescentes, une amitié a priori inébranlable et qui va pourtant s’étioler petit à petit. Parce que si Julia a les pieds sur terre, Cassie a du mal à trouver sa place dans cette société, et lorsque sa mère tombe amoureuse, sa vie est chamboulée… Voici un livre plein d’émotions sur les affres de l’adolescence, les raisons qui font qu’une amitié peut s’évaporer, et le ressenti de deux jeunes filles face à des événements sur lesquels elles n’ont pas de prise. Une très belle plume et une histoire pleine de mystères.
Un passage parmi d’autres
To be in that ruin with Cassie – it was such a particular feeling that I have had nowhere else. If ever I have it again, I will recognize it, like a long-lost scent, and that afternoon and the one that followed will return to me, in all their visceral intensity. The Bonnybrook was at once the most unlikely, vivid experience of our lives up till then, and like a dream – a dream, miraculously, that Cassie and I dreamed in tandem, touching, hearing, and feeling together. The asylym was darkened by the traces of its pasts; made titillating, even scary, by its silences – but made safer too by our sharing it. Being in the Bonnybrook was like being inside both Cassie’s head and my own, as if we had one mind and could roam its limits together, inventing stories and making ourselves as we wanted them to be.
Claire Messud – The Burning Girl – septembre 2017 (W.W. Norton & Company)
