In her moving, elegiac new novel The Burning Girl , Claire Messud alludes to childhood as a Wordsworthian time when we still trail “clouds of glory.” For adolescence, though, she invokes the Biblical phrase “through a glass darkly,” meaning that what we think we see and know of life and ourselves is imperfect. That the “weight of the world falls upon us” in adolescence, and pain and fear and uncertainty replace the bliss of being young. The Burning Girl is a haunting coming-of-age story in the form of recollections narrated by young Julia Robinson, 14, when the story begins. Messud’s accomplishment is her exploration of both the carefree joys of childhood and the “social struggles and the agonies and embarrassments of puberty,” and to pique curiosity from the ominous opening line, “You’d think it wouldn’t bother me now…” But, as the reader sees, it does and always will. Julia and the thin, almost wraith-like Cassie Burnes, she of the angelic blond-white hair, live near each other in a