Book Review: Girl A, by Abigail Dean

You don’t know me, but you’ll have seen my face.

Girl A

Lex is on her way to the prison where her biological mother has just died. She is the executor of the will, although she doesn’t understand why, given that she has refused to see her mother all of the time that she has been there. Lex is Girl A. She and her siblings were abused by their parents in their family home which became known, by the press, as the House of Horrors.

We drove to Hollowfield through the gloaming. Clouds sagged over the hills. We passed the old factories, with their spindly chimneys and every other window kicked in. There was a functional high street with a second-hand bookshop, and a café just closing. Grey men stood at the door of the pub, their collars turned up.

Girl A

One night, Lex managed to slip free from her binds and escape out of the window, running to flag down a car. The freed children are each adopted by different families and go on to have very different lives.

Included in the will is the House, which has been left to the children. Lex has the idea that it should be turned into a community centre to give the town of Hollowfield, which has had to live in the shadow of the family’s story, something positive. To do this, Lex will need the sign-off of her siblings, and so, has to go and see each of them in-person.

Girl A is the story of Lex and her family. Each chapter focuses on one of the siblings with Lex telling the reader what she knows of what happened to them after they left the House. As the book goes on, we piece together what happened to the family and what happened to the mother and father to make them do such things to their own children.

I tried to turn on a gentle light, but hit the overhead switch by mistake. Kicked off the bedcovers and lay in a stupor on the mattress. Cursed Delilah; hotel lighting; the novice percussion band rehearsing in my skull; the whisky society; the tilt of the earth; London in the heat; the distance from the bed to the shower. Under the cool, clean water, I made myself vomit, and rested my forehead against the tiles. Delilah.

Girl A

I thought Abigail Dean created a set of strong characters, each with their own flaws. The children had to try and find a way to protect themselves and were each affected in adulthood by the trauma. One of the things that really moved me was Lex’s comparison of trauma living in someone’s insides to Japanese knotweed living in a house’s foundations and how it will always impact on all future relationships.  

Each spring, fleshy roots infest your garden. They grow fast. Canes emerge, bloated and purple… You attempt to cut the plant at the canes. Within a day, it returns. You attempt to cut the plant at the root. Within a week, it returns…

Should you disclose this invasion to your buyer?… How will you feel at the thought of them unpacking their lives in your empty rooms, with the plant stirring beneath them?

Girl A

It is an addictive read and the story is so well told: slowly, Lex releases the information she knows and, slowly, she uncovers what she doesn’t from her brothers and sisters.

When I finished Girl A, I was completely shattered by it. The book was full of horror but there was nothing gratuitous or unbelievable in it. Often the worst of the violence was left to the reader’s imagination. It was a hard book to read but it was compelling and I don’t think I’ll be forgetting it anytime soon!