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I think it’s the level of corrupt human nature – I just can’t fathom that people exist who would do this. The story begins with the thoughts of the oldest child, Girl A, the one who escaped and was able to free her other siblings. I didn’t necessarily need more grim descriptions, but with all the jumping between timelines there wasn’t a clear narrative as to when things started getting worse in the house and why.
Better known in the tabloids as “The House of Horrors” this isn’t a place that anyone in the family wants to own nor revisit. This is a juicy j read for those who were fascinated/horrified/curious about the Turpin case that left us all wondering: "WHY! This had me gripped from the start, you can’t help but be drawn in with this beautifully written story about survival against all odds. Moving back and forth between the present, where their mother has died in prison, and the past, Girl A is harrowing, gripping and also, somehow, life-affirming – an incredible achievement for a first novel.
I enjoy all types of thrillers/ suspense novels, this one just happened to leave out the thrills and suspense. An only child who grew up in the village of Hayfield in Derbyshire, Dean has always had an interest in brothers and sisters. I mostly keen on thrillers more than psychological fiction but it was still intriguing and heart wrenching novel which is beautifully written.
The story is told from the perspective of Girl A, Lex Gracie, and follows the now grown-up Gracie siblings as they navigate adulthood after a childhood filled with horror, abuse and starvation. And when you've lived under a system of extreme physical and psychological torture, what you carry is so large and heavy. It’s a poignant parental crisis, though as a dramatic conflict, it doesn’t quite power “Girl” through a wandering second half in which characters’ incremental shifts in regard and outlook stand in for major incident.However, when the narrative inhabits the past—which makes it the present—the fear, isolation, and confusion are almost palpable. Dean says: “Ethan really behaves questionably, both in the house and after, in the way he manipulates the press attention. British-Nigerian playwright and filmmaker Adura Onashile makes a promising feature-length debut with this study of an intensely bonded mother and daughter resettling in Glasgow. The gradual, pained steps they make toward social integration — in the process severing some apron strings knotted suffocatingly tight by trauma — mark the subtle curve of the drama in this accomplished but unshowy debut feature from Onashile, a British-Nigerian playwright here lightly expanding on themes raised in her auspicious 2020 short “Expensive Shit.
This is a book that contains an entirely unique narrative and has occasional flashes of brilliance scattered among its pages, yet for the most part is a major disappointment. Girl A stands alongside books like Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild, or Kate Millet’s The Basement for its unflinching depictions of trauma. There is nothing casual about what happens here, and the victims are the heroes, in the most difficult, compromised ways imaginable. I would've liked to know how she got her education after being so far behind and what were her motivations behind being a lawyer after dealing with such a horrendous childhood.In the earlier pictures, they bludgeoned our features with pixels, right down to our waists; even our hair was too distinctive to disclose. The structure of the book’s short chapters moves back and forth through time, often uninterested in progressing plot, guided, instead, by Lex’s troubled attempts at relating her experiences. In Girl A there are 7 kids but some of them are chained, all are abused and starved and the crime is only discovered when a 15 year old girl escapes through a window. This was a big hit novel closely based on a real crime in which a nanny stabbed to death the two children she was looking after.
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