Girl A

Girl A

By Abigail Dean

She thought she had escaped her past. But there are some things you can’t outrun.

Lex Gracie doesn't want to think about her family. She doesn't want to think about growing up in her parents' House of Horrors. And she doesn't want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped, the eldest sister who freed her older brother and four younger siblings. It's been easy enough to avoid her parents--her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can't run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the home into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her siblings--and with the childhood they shared.

What begins as a propulsive tale of escape and survival becomes a gripping psychological family story about the shifting alliances and betrayals of sibling relationships--about the secrets our siblings keep, from themselves and each other. Who have each of these siblings become? How do their memories defy or galvanize Lex's own? As Lex pins each sibling down to agree to her family's final act, she discovers how potent the spell of their shared family mythology is, and who among them remains in its thrall and who has truly broken free.

I 'd like to say I knew what the (or "a", I guess, since both are revealed very closely in time) "twist" was from the very beginning, but if I'm being honest, I could only so far as to say that I was mildly irritated that there were supposedly seven rescued people but only six chapters, and that we skipped Boy C and went from Boy B to Boy D.  Normally that would alert someone that yes, Boy C is missing and therefore probably not alive, but I was like, Hey, maybe I can't count, or keep people straight, and I'm just along for the ride, so take me where thou wilt.  So yeah, I was not really surprised that Boy C was summarily dispatched as soon as we knew his name, although it was honestly heartbreaking to know he'd died the moment we knew who he was.  And the other death twist was also not a huge surprise, although I'd been misled by the conversation about wedding guests, and Girl A's comment that Evie and Delilah didn't get along.  

So if it was meant to be a shock, total failure.  But I'm not really sure what the book was going for - was it going for a meditation on what it takes to survive? Or is it a tragedy about how this family ended up in this situation to begin with? I'm going to assume the author borrowed inspiration liberally from the Turpin case, although the story is set in England (part of it takes place in Blackpool). There's other long term child abuse/imprisonment cases but to be honest, most of them come with a side of sexual abuse too, which was not really present as such in Girl A (there is a fadeout of a punishment and the implication that a wooden stake messes up Lex's ability to have children, soooo...probably present? But also unclear). 

I dunno, the book is a fast read, but because of the present and past framing aspect, it feels like we have trouble striking the right tone.  The present stuff is all about getting approval to make the house into a community center, which isn't exactly scintillating stuff. The climax of this storyline is Lex's realization that Evie died, which, since we're viewing it from her perspective and she doesn't know it (because trauma), can't be used as a build-up of tension, so we're sort of waffling about for a good chunk of story there.  

The past storyline is interesting, but we spend a lot of time on the before aspect of things, and don't get into the Binding Days etc., until the very end (although once we were in that part, I very much did not want to be. I had a dreadful foreboding about the baby, and just did not want to get into that).  It felt weird to be reading this as entertainment, like it just reinforced the feeling that anyone reading this is ghoulish.  The Marsh King's Daughter (and Room for that matter) did a better job, I think, of making this type of story enjoyable (for lack of a better word) by avoiding the POV of the primary victim, and focusing on the child who had a very different perspective. And The Marsh King's Daughter went a step further in making the main character kind of unlikeable too, a product of her environment, but still pretty cold to her mother and other people's problems. 

I think I saw that Dean's intention was to focus on the aftermath sort of, the media and attention and not on the crime itself.  If so, then I think we should have had the revelation about Evie much much earlier in the book. It springs from a decision that the psychologist (Dr. K) makes about Lex's recovery and for better or for worse, informs a lot of Lex's decisions and actions, but it comes too late to do much more than wrap everything up. There's a lot that's held back, I assume because of pacing issues (Noah's life, Ethan's participation in the final beating), that if we're making this a story about the ways these families are failed after the initial media onslaught, doesn't do justice to that aspect. G's chapter deals with this the most, but we spend very little time (if any) on Ethan or Delilah's foster situations, and how they decided to separate the kids versus having them do group sessions together. 

  

Overall, it was engrossing and kept me interested, but after I was done I felt gross and unhappy.  I needed something different right away to wash the taste out. Anyway, this may be stretching it, but the wedding is a focal point of the book, and we have a big scene there, so I'm calling it a party book. Kind of ironic, since this is the last book where you'd think, "I bet there's a party scene!" 

38: A Book Featuring a Party.