At just fifteen, Lex Gracie escapes her family home on Moor Woods Road, flags down a car and thus rescues her siblings from what is soon dubbed by the press as the “House of Horrors”. She is named Girl A to keep her identity secret from the world. Her siblings, Ethan, Evie, Gabriel, Delilah and Noah, are similarly named.
Now, years later, Lex, a lawyer based in NYC, is off to the prison where her mother has just died. Lex has been named executor of the estate, which is comprised of the house and a little bit of money. Lex feels the right thing to do is to build a community centre where the house stands, but in order to do that she needs her siblings to sign off. Abigail Dean’s accomplished debut Girl A traces Lex’s journey through the trauma of her past as she locates and visits with her siblings in an effort to secure their signatures.
Wisely, Dean chooses to leave much of what happens in the house to the reader’s imagination. It’s more than enough, trust me.
Sometimes, in my head, I visit our little room. There were two single beds, pressed into opposite corners, as far away from each other as they could be. My bed and Evie’s bed. A bare bulb hung between them and twitched at footsteps in the hallway outside. It was usually dull. but sometimes, if Father decided, it was left on for days. He had sealed a flattened cardboard box against the window, intending to control time, but a dim, brown light seeped through and granted us our days and nights.
The disintegration of the Gracie family doesn’t happen all at once, although the father, Charlie, is definitely volatile. As he becomes more and more evangelical – even going so far as to start his own church – he becomes more rigid and violent. Lex and Evie finds solace in a hidden book of Greek myths and school is a safe place until Charlie forbids them to go. Lex’s mother shrinks into the background, often disappearing for days into her bedroom to care for the newest baby.
Lex unspools the story of her childhood as she visits with each of her siblings, all adopted into different families after the rescue. Thus, this is a story about the aftermath of trauma as much as it is about the trauma itself. What becomes of these children makes for compelling reading.
The Ludic Reader 