Girl A
By: Abigail Dean
Released: February 2nd, 2021
Pages: 352
My Rating: 3/5
Released: February 2nd, 2021
Pages: 352
My Rating: 3/5
Goodreads Synopsis:
"'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, 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.
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.
My Review:
I hardly ever read book reviews midst reading a book, but sometimes you simply must know if the book gets any better to see if you should stick with it. I hate writing anything negative, however, I want to be 100% honest in my reviews and if I'm being honest, this was not the book for me. It was not that it was inherently bad but it felt off and clumsy in some places. The premise was good but the execution of it was lackluster. I normally do not mind time skips or jumps but the way this read at times made it very confusing. There were multiple times I had to go back and reread a scene to make sense of it because it was so vague.
My other biggest quarrel with this book is that it felt predictable to me. I know this will not be a problem for everyone and I read that many people loved the twist and turns this book took. The main reason I stuck with reading this book was because of the reviews that said "OMG that twist at the end though". Now I consume a lot (I mean a lot) of true crime/thriller/horror media, so maybe this is a case of me seeing what was coming from picking up on inferences or maybe since I read those reviews I was looking a lot closer for hints at something but I had this "big twist" pegged down before page 100. I was so disappointed when I continued reading to find out my hunch was correct because it felt like a waste of time spent finishing the book. Having been so predictable made the twist less explosive and have virtually no impact on me because I saw it coming for a couple hundred pages. I will say it was a good ending, but not when you see it coming so early on.
Overall, I have to say that I feel very disappointed because the synopsis of this book has such potential to be amazing and it really captured my attention, but I left it feeling frustrated. I'm giving it three stars because overall, I think it's a fairly decent book and if you don't pick up on ALL THE DANG HINTS given about the twist at the end I think it could be very impactful, nevertheless, in my reading experience it fell flat. It felt convoluted with sometimes giving out the most mundane details and other times not even close to enough details to help you follow along thus making this my first frustrating read of 2021.
Catch you later,
Molly
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