Girl A by Abigail Dean

From Goodreads

'Girl A,' she said. ‘The girl who escaped. If anyone was going to make it, it was going to be you.’

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. 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 six siblings – and with the childhood they shared.

My thoughts

I gave this debut novel by this Author a 4 stars or 8/10.

This is a book that as I was reading it, I wasn't sure what to make of it to be honest.  I think it's a book that will stay with me for a while to be honest.  If I had been gripped all the way through, it might have received a 5 stars or 10/10.  It didn't grip me all the way through, at times I felt like giving up.  Yet something kept dragging me back, that was the need to find out what happened in the present and what had happened in the past.  It was a real slow burner in my opinion and I feel that it would make a great reading group read.

The book should come with a little bit of a warning as it features some child cruelty, but it's not voyeuristic or necessarily gratuitous.  At times it's inferred rather than detailed passages.  It's a very dark read, yet it's a compelling read as you do get drawn into the lives of the children.

Told in the present and the past, this story tells us about Lex Gracie a young successful woman who had escaped the past and was quite happily living in the present, until her Mother passed away.  A Mother that she would rather not have been reminded about, due to the past and all that had happened to her and her siblings.  As Lex is drawn back into the past, due to a bequest in the will that her Mother had made.  Her Mother is still controlling from beyond the grave.  Lex has to come to terms with what happened in the house that was known as the House of Horrors, the house that she was brought up in and which she managed to escape from, gaining her the name 'Girl A'.  How will Lex cope with the memories and how will she cope with seeing her siblings that all have a similar shared past in more ways than one?

I will be intrigued to see what Abigail Dean writes next, as this was a great debut novel.  In some ways it reminded me of Flowers in the Attic, having devoured that as a teen it's a book that has stayed with me all my life.  I still can't comprehend how some parents can behave to their children and I never will.