Girl A

Title: Girl A

Author: Abigail Dean

Genre: Women’s fiction

PopSugar Reading Challenge Prompt: A book you think your best friend would like

This book was one of the Book of the Month‘s selections for February. I absolutely had to select Kristin Hannah’s newest, and I already had another book as an add-on, so I checked with my local library and saw they had this one as an ebook. The blurb sounded really good, so I took a stab and checked it out.

From Goodreads: 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.

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.

Wow. You guys. This book just kept me reading. I couldn’t put it down. The House of Horrors was terrible, but not as graphic as I was expecting. Lex frequently references her scars, but how she gets them is referred to, but not described in detail. More is left up to the imagination than not, which might be worse, depending on who you are. The story is told as both present time and flashbacks so by the book’s end, you understand Lex and her family’s full story. As tough as this book is, it’s also beautifully written. I definitely recommend this one!