Burn Girl

It's not often you find a book that is set in Durango, so when Burn Girl, by Mandy Mikulencak, came out I jumped at the chance to read it. And I'm very glad I did. The YA novel is about a girl named Arlie, who has a large burn scar on her face from a meth lab explosion when she was young. She and her mother fled an abusive step-father to Durango, where they live a life on the fringe. When Arlie's mom dies of an overdose, Arlie's uncle moves to town and becomes her guardian. This normalcy forces Arlie to deal with normal teen drama's, but then someone from the past shows up and puts her new life into jeopardy.

I really liked this book. The characters were convincing, and it was an interesting look at how addiction can be handled in families and what recovery can sometimes look like. The story was fast-paced, and extremely entertaining: I couldn't put it down. It was also neat to read a book set in a place that I see every day, the parks and motels (the shadier places in the book had their names changed, but you can kinda tell what they were based off of), the high school (she even had the lunch breaks right). I really liked this book, a good YA story based along the same lines as Crank, this is a great book.