Girl A, Abigail Dean’s debut novel, shares a kinship with Emma Donoghue’s Room and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones in its harrowing portrayal of trauma. Like those titles, Girl A is certain to rouse strong emotions. It is a haunting, powerful book, the mystery at its heart not who committed a crime, but how to carry on with life in its aftermath ... I kept wanting to read Girl A as a fairy tale or parable, to cauterize some of the suffering in its pages, but Dean resists that impulse at every turn, always rooting Lex’s story in the real. Dean looks squarely at the sort of parents who humiliate their children, or hit them, or deny them food, and the consequences of such monstrousness ... Dean tells this story with such nuance and humanity, you’re desperate to step into its pages. To help.
... a lovely, precision-tooled piece of kit ... Oddly, even though it deals in an obscenity, it’s actually easier to swallow than crime novels where women and children are casually slaughtered to prove how clever the police officer is. There is nothing casual about what happens here, and the victims are the heroes, in the most difficult, compromised ways imaginable. It’s sharp and refreshing to have a female heroine who doesn’t have to be sexy and feisty ... The writing is clean and compelling, the choices interesting and fully fleshed out. The flashbacks are upsetting but not torture porn ... It seems odd to describe such a book as profoundly entertaining, but stories have always dealt in gore and death and this is no exception. It’s terrific: finally, an Oxbridge graduate succeeding in doing something really, really well.
... macabre ... Dean's [book], despite a late-game twist, often reads more like a slow-burn character study, though it's richer for it ... vividly...play[s]...parental misdeeds not just for literary intrigue but real, nightmarish resonance: mothers of invention till the end.
There’s something about dark narratives about dysfunctional families that pulls readers in. It probably stems from a sense of empathy mixed with familiarity. However, some stories take dysfunction into places so dark and dangerous that readers aren’t pulled in; they’re brutally dragged. Abigail Dean’s Girl A belongs to this second group. A crushing tale that delves into the horrors of a devastating past and explores its impact on the present, this novel explores the very unique and complicated world of siblings coping with shared trauma ... Dean’s prose is stylish, but she pulls no punches and every time the narrative goes back in time, she ensures the horrifying atmosphere of the kids’ lives is seen on the page ... Whenever the narrative is in this contemporary space, the prose is tense and dialogue carries a lot of the action, but it clear that the past is always present in some way. However, when the narrative inhabits the past—which makes it the present—the fear, isolation, and confusion are almost palpable. Lex is forced to deal with a horrendous reality in which everyday occurrences and minor problems are exacerbated by her situation. When this happens, Dean’s sharp, first person prose gets to the core of things unflinchingly, and that makes many passages memorable ... There are places where descriptions of places or Lex’s thoughts slightly bog down the narrative, but the strength of the writing makes even those slower moments enjoyable. Girl A is extremely bleak, but its bleakness never becomes overpowering and the story is gripping, so the pages keep flying even when things get extremely dark. This great debut announces the arrival of a strong new voice in psychological thrillers that’s not afraid to go into the shadowy corners where bad things happen…and their memories remain.
Forgiveness can be both cathartic and corrosive, depending on how one is affected by another's actions, as illustrated in Abigail Dean's gripping debut, Girl A ... Complicated relationships mired in the past accentuate the solid psychological thriller Girl A.
Let’s face it, a book centered around the wretched child abuse of a large family at the hands of a demented religious fanatic has some inherent drama to it. The reader is going to want to find out what happens to those poor kids. But what if the author purposely sets out to withhold revelations until practically the last page? ... Gradually, we piece the story together, but the book is half over before that happens ... Virtually none of the characters is likeable ... The book gathers some force in the last quarter of its 342 pages ... We get a sense of what this book could have been if it had been structured differently.
Told in Lex’s arresting first-person voice, the novel moves back and forth in time, revealing the siblings’ ghastly childhood and their current condition. In the process, Dean does a brilliant job of character development, starting with Lex herself, who is now a successful attorney—thanks partially to the years of therapy necessary to deal with her memories and with her monstrous father. Lex is a fascinating study in abnormal psychology, and the novel is, altogether, a tour de force, beautifully written, richly imagined, and compulsively readable. Add to this its grave, sometimes ominous tone, and the result is unforgettable.
The frequent and ambiguous narrative shifts from past to present can be hard to follow, but the author skillfully brings the complicated relationships among the siblings as well as the secrets they share into dramatic relief. This assured psychological thriller marks Dean as a writer to watch.
