Iglesias is PANK Magazine’s book reviews editor, Entropy Magazine’s film/television editor, and a columnist for LitReactor and Clash Media.

Lex wants to use the money and the house for something good, but is unable to do so without the agreement of each of her siblings. Your emotions will be everywhere as you witness the six children’s provocative, disturbing, extremely sad abuse, neglect story! I wasn’t remotely interested in the characters, and read on out of blind commitment than any real interest. Dean also read about Jasmine Block, the teenager who swam across a lake in Minnesota after being held captive for a month. Unfortunately, while alternating timelines she chose to flashback and forward and change points of view while doing so.As an adult, Lex is named executor of her mother’s estate, which involves meeting up with the siblings again and ultimately revisiting the house. Lex is known as Girl A, the first child to escape her parents ‘House of Horrors’ and lead the police to discover her siblings, chained and starved. I didn’t see why the adult Lex had to be a lawyer, as the details of her job and colleagues are uninteresting and contribute nothing to the story.

She’s persuasively matched and reflected by newcomer Bonsu, who grows in stature and expressivity as Ama opens herself to the outside world.It has traces of Emma Donoghue’s Room and Lisa Jewell’s The People Upstairs, two books dealing with the worst thing any of us can imagine: imprisoned, tortured children hidden in plain sight. As a child, Dean wrote all the time, getting into fan fiction as a teenager (Final Fantasy stuff, she admits – she was a big gamer at the time). Many of the scenes from their childhood are disturbing, though I would say I didn't find it to be gratuitous in the way books like I Know Who You Are and My Absolute Darling were. La vera casa degli orrori, quella a cui Abigail Dean si è ispirata, è in Muir Woods Road in California, che nel romanzo diventa Moor Woods Road in Inghilterra.

Girl A stands alongside books like Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild, or Kate Millet’s The Basement for its unflinching depictions of trauma. It comes with excitable reports of huge international sales and an insistence that it will be everywhere. When the body of Bronte, a girl who has been working in the local bar, is found on the beach, the events of the past come roaring back. I can't be the only person who finished this and thought about how much damage Ethan will end up inflicting on his family. note to the author: if we're going to jump timelines (which is one of my all time favourite storytelling techniques) can we possibly not do that literally every other paragraph?Lex is the titular Girl A, the woman who as a child escaped the house where she and her siblings were held. And thirdly, I wasn’t in love with Abigail Dean’s brittle, oblique style where everything is alluded to knowingly and hardly anything is spelled out, and there are about 300 characters. The characters are well drawn and compelling for sure - the exploration of survival and resettlement after trauma is well done. 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. I mostly keen on thrillers more than psychological fiction but it was still intriguing and heart wrenching novel which is beautifully written.