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.

Tam Lin

Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean

The classic story about the headstrong Janet who defies Tam Lin to walk in her own land of Carterhaugh and thenmust battle with the Queen of Faery herself for possession of her lover's mortal body and soul in the twentieth century. Set in a small Midwestern college in Vietnam-era America, Tam Lin is a contemporary fantasy about a heroine poised in that twilight between youth and passion.

This review is about Tam Lin, or as I like to call it, The Evolution of an Asshole. Not in the scatological sense. More like in the four-letter word sense. Janet Carter is a real dipstick. I'm not saying she's not realistic, I mean, we all know someone who was that person in college, heck, I was that person. But even I think it's kind of rank to be all,"I know you just got broken up with in a shitty way, but I hate even pretending to be sympathetic so much I have to trade off the job with someone else," and then turn around and use them for their dorm room. That scene where Janet gets told she's really not all that big hearted was pretty much the high point of the book for me. Suck it, Janet!

But Janet truly does become a much nicer person by the end of the book - four years down the line, and she finally learns not to be such a holier-than-thou snot. This is the second time I tried to read the book, and I gotta tell you, it was painful at first. Pamela Dean makes the weird decision to spend progressively less and less time on Janet's life as we approach the climax of the book, so we get about 180 pages on the first month, then another 130 on the rest of the first year, then 60 on the entire second year, then a mere 20 on the third year, then the whole last year takes up about 55 pages. And I'm pretty sure that's only because Dean had to stuff 80% of the plot into that, otherwise it'd be, like, four pages. What's even more obnoxious about it is that Janet as a freshman isn't nearly as fun to read about as Janet as a senior. Janet as a freshman is that kid who thinks that anyone who isn't exactly like them is barely even worth pretending to be nice to. Janet as a senior actually has feelings besides superiority, canyoubelieveit?

As you might have been able to tell, I was not a huge fan of the book. And I don't even know why, because this has been recommended by so many writers and readers that I trust. I just did not like it. It doesn't help that all of the characters felt supercilious and unsympathetic, and that (as discussed above) the book feels lopsided, so that the point to which it is building is almost an afterthought, like a snapshot of a more exciting story tacked on to a long treatise on how Janet Carter spent her freshman year. Plus, I was annoyed at how Janet managed to be friends with Nick and Robin, because let's face it, these guys are some real pieces of work. I don't care how many times you've been to college, when you attend a play, you sit your ass down and you shut the fuck up. People who talk and sigh loudly and wiggle around to impress upon you that how much greater their opinion of the play is than the play itself are jerkwads. Don't feed into their childish demands for attention. I once took this guy to a play (WHY, KATIE, WHY) and he basically did this thing, you know, the whole, my boredom with sitting here is more important than other people's experiences thing, and I pretty much never spoke to him again. I drove him back to his place in silence, my hands gripped tightly behind the wheel lest I be tempted to strangle him.

There was one line I particularly liked, because it swept me off into a frenzy of pleasurable imaginings, i.e., ones that distracted me from the actual story. I'm talking about the one where one of the guys is all, "Life's too short to be petty." Now, that's not a statement that I've never heard before, but this time it got me wondering, does this mean that if life were longer, it would be okay to be petty? So that people who live forever are incredibly nitpicky? Does this explain why vampires are always attracted to teenage girls in the novels? Is it just like cleaving unto like? I've always thought if I had a lot of time on my hands I would be pretty chill about the whole thing and not get fussed about the little details, but maybe not. Maybe I would be like, "You returned my book with dog eared pages? I'ma get you arrested for making pot brownies."

And I just could not get behind all the literary quotes in the book. I am not an English major. In fact, I hate English classes, mostly because most English teachers are fans of the "But what does Hamlet's talk with Yorick's skull mean?" school of thought whereas I am more of the, "It means Hamlet's off his rocker," school. And the more irksome I find a character, the less inclined I am to examine their motivations (I loathe Hamlet, and for that matter most of Shakespeare's 'great' tragedies. I cannot and will not give up my abiding loyalty to Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors, which my eighth grade teacher infuriatingly dismissed as "bathroom humour." Someday I will get you back for that comment, Ms. Banks. Of course, when I was younger I also liked Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom best, so maybe my taste is suspect). So all the deep character-revealing excerpts from poems and such that they all quote was just wasted on me. It was all tedious. Like that scene in Gattaca that my mother and I like to do to each other, where Jude Law just drawls, "I'm bored of talking to you. I'm bored." Gosh, that movie is good. And I hate that Janet quotes all these long passages. Robin and Nick also bother me, yes, but I am willing to give them a pass because when I'm five hundred years old maybe I'll have memorized Spenser's entire canon, who knows. But Janet? Uh uh. No one who is not actually (so many actuallys in this post!) a five hundred year old poet would have all that memorized. Heck, I couldn't even get the Jude Law quote right when I first typed it!

I will say that the end of the book is pretty fun, though. I don't think it's worth slogging through the beginning, but maybe it's better to have a terrible beginning and a good ending than a good beginning and a terrible ending. I'm still confused about all the pregnant girls who committed suicide though. Is Dean suggesting that these guys knocked the girls up and then the girls were so upset they committed suicide? Or that the girls couldn't manage to rescue the boys so they committed suicide after their lovers' deaths? It was weird. And how come nobody noticed that all the classics majors are like, seven year seniors? Doesn't it worry the dean of the school that no one in the classics program is graduating on time? And how is it possible to switch from Classics to English and yet still have to take three additional years of credits, how does nothing from Classics fulfill the English requirements? It's not like you're switching from film production to chemistry.

I have no more to say on this book. It's boring, I'm bored.