I know she was trying to explain it to the reader, but she could have found a more believable way to do so.

Abigail Dean took pretty clear inspiration from their story for this book, and it’s a truly tragic tale in its own right. Together with her sister Evie, Lex wants to turn the evil house into a force of good, a space for children and art. 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. However, before that happens, the siblings will have to get through the scars they carry and learn to cope with their past, their differences, the secrets they keep from each other, and their shifting alliances.No, this is your classic case of journey mattering over destination - we follow Lex throughout, be it past or present, and she just tells her story. It’s a quiet, psychological exploration of how one of these House of Horrors—these terrible stories you hear about every few years—can actually happen. There was so little fluidity to the story, with snatches of detail about one aspect of the plot then followed by those of another, so it was all just extremely difficult to follow. subjectively speaking I enjoyed it without ever tipping over into the kind of bookish obsession that grips me. As she comes to terms with her mother's death in prison, we see the inner turmoil Lexie (Girl A) has gone through.

I want to know what went on in the house and in the minds of those in the house, including the mother.

The characters are well drawn and compelling for sure - the exploration of survival and resettlement after trauma is well done. The traumatic theme of Girl A is not the easiest to read about but the way Abigail Dean tells this story is wildly compelling. The chapters are very long and jump back and forth between various periods in the past and the present. Now she and her sister Evie try to gather their four siblings to go back to house for the last time as a good will gesture which eventually bring out the ugly flashbacks of their past hit their faces harsher than they imagine. Unfortunately, while alternating timelines she chose to flashback and forward and change points of view while doing so.

I think it's very easy to assume that when a sibling group in an abusive situation is rescued, the result will be siblings who tried to protect each other and thought as a unit and will be bonded forever to protect each other. 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. It is a powerful piece of work, but that does not mean to say I enjoyed reading it, as the shifting timelines made it all the more difficult to connect with. It's a nice way to conclude something terrible and makes us feel better about how awful family can be. And also - how can such grisly horrors be kept away from the eyes of the surveillance society and its many-tentacled authorities for years?Special thanks to NetGalley and PENGUIN GROUP Viking for sharing incredible arc with me in exchange for my honest opinions.

But while school brings the feelings of otherness and alienation they feared, it brings Ama an unexpected ally in cheery neighbour and classmate Fiona (Liana Turner). For me, I think the problem was that in an attempt to be sympathetic of the various potential triggers within the book (and there are many), the author has overlooked a lot of the emotion.

Alexandra Gracie is Girl A, now a successful New York based lawyer at the age of 15 she escaped the ‘House of Horrors’ in England where she and her siblings suffered neglect and abuse. It’s five years since Theresa May, then the United Kingdom’s first prime minister of the Brexit era, coined the term “citizen of nowhere” to denigrate residents of the country who identified themselves more globally. Alice and her partner Joe pick up sticks and move from London to Penton, a bucolic (and fictional) Cotswold “market town. Here, though, the escape comes first, as Lex recounts the horrific details of how, as a child, she escaped from the bed in which she’d been chained by her father, smashing a window and jumping out, running for help despite her injuries, stopping a passing car. True crime stories are interesting to me and although I know this is a fictional telling of the Turpin family I feel Dean did a great job of portraying how a family could descend into becoming a 'house of horrors' and also how difficult the survivors lives must be afterwards.