My Amazon and Goodreads review of Girl A: A Novel by Abigail Dean (Rating 5) – Dodging Shadows from the Past. Girl A by Abigail Dean is the indelible story of the aftermath of extreme child abuse on a family of siblings, told from the adult POV of the second oldest. Thirteen-year-old Girl A, the identity given her in the initial police report, is the one who escapes from the house where she and her six siblings are held hostage by their parents, leading to the release of the others, their father’s suicide, and their mother’s incarceration. Although we learn the horrors of their imprisonment, the novel’s focus is on how the surviving children reintegrate into society, with varying success. As a fiction writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I was impressed by the earthly complexity of the almost other-worldly characters Dean creates. “Survivor” is the term applied to a person who emerges from a trauma, alive. But the word is less a noun than a process, a fluid state that ebbs and flows as the individual steps forward while dodging shadows from the past. Although Girl A (Alexandra, or Lex) is the narrator, she initially tells us more about the siblings she reconnects with after the death of their mother than about herself. Perhaps that’s the point. If Lex survives only by running from herself, how can she possibly tell others who she is? Is she a reliable observer of her siblings, or is her view tainted by distorted memory and blocked by the walls she has erected? We do eventually discover the illusion Lex must maintain to sustain her fragile existence. Extreme as this falsehood may seem, acts of denial enable us all to survive after pain we would otherwise find unbearable. Even after closing the book, readers will be shadowed by Girl A.
