Girl A by Abigail Dean [BOOK REVIEW]

About The Book:

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 House of Horrors into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her siblings – and with the childhood they shared.

My Thoughts:

I have always been fascinated by psychological thrillers, and not sure why it took me so long to pick “Girl A”. We follow the story of Lex, who managed to escape from her parents when she was fifteen.

I struggled with the beginning of the story, due to the timeline and the way it was written. Lex is our main character and she just finds out that her mother passed away in prison and she is handed the task to sort out the inheritance and will. But that same mother, alongside her father, are the reason Lex and her siblings were held captive. Now Lex has to reunite with the remaining siblings and re-open the wounds from the past.

The more I found out about what happened to the kids, the more intrigued and curious I became. I admired Lex’s bravery and the adversity she went through. I cheered for her and was glad to see her succeed. But as is the case with all thrillers, not everything is always as it seems. The trauma Lex endured appears to come with a cost, and it was very heartbreaking to see this. That moment, that revelation really surprised me. 

“Girl A” is such a gripping read, but also utterly saddening.

To see how a person’s beliefs and wrong people’s influence can create monsters. Or is it an excuse for the failures they endured in life? It’s also heartbreaking to see how reading from Lex’s point of view, she was made to believe it is all normal and that is how things are supposed to be. On the other hand, we have a community. The teachers, the neighbours, the wider family – could it all have been prevented had they paid more attention, or cared a bit more.

There were signs – in the clothes the kids were wearing, in the things they said and how they behaved, and later on, in their absence and abrupt responses from the parents. Would it have made a difference if someone noticed? And finally – accountability, or shall I say, the lack of. How some people continued with their lives unpunished, despite everything. Or how people have partial courage, and once brave, decide to then stay quiet the next time.

The truth is, the book asks a lot of questions and doesn’t give enough answers to satiate my curiosity. I wanted to know what happened next. I wanted clarity on the last scene, and don’t like to speculate about what happened. Esentially, I wanted to know if Lex gets better and finds the happiness she deserves. I can’t help but hope she does, but we’ll never really know for sure. The part that scares me the most is that situations like these are probably happening all around the world, and we don’t know about them, because truth be told, we don’t really pay much attention to our surroundings, and if we did, we wouldn’t really do anything that changes the status quo. 

About the Author:

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