Girl A

by Abigail Dean

[pamela]

Girl A was a quick and easy read, but it wasn't what I was expecting - to its detriment. This novel was marketed as a thriller...it wasn't.

With a promising concept, Girl A tells the slightly reskinned story of the real-life Turpin case, where a teenage girl escaped her home to alert the authorities that she and her siblings were kept prisoner in their home in horrendous conditions. When I say slightly reskinned, I do mean slightly, as almost every single aspect of the case is replicated in Girl A, from family photographs down to the popular name for the case "House of Horrors." The only real difference was the number of children and the location.

Perhaps because Girl A is written to so closely resemble a real case, the novel's real failing was to be incredibly coy, for lack of a better word, about talking about any of the book's more sordid events. I didn't need voyeuristic detail, but a lot of Girl A's more horrific moments were simply "fade to black" which got frustrating after a while. There was a lot of allusion, vague handwaving in the general direction of a concept, and almost no clarity, which just made me frustrated as a kept reading.

Unlike a lot of other readers, I actually enjoyed the time jumps. I also liked that each chapter focused on one of the children individually. Because of this, however, I would have liked more detail. We only ever get the story from Lex's (Girl A) point of view, and for that reason there is never any real detail on what happened in the house when she wasn't present. For a character who spent a lot of time chained to a bed in a dark room, you can imagine how much narrative detail we miss. I would have preferred having the story told from those various characters' points of view so we could have learned about them, their motivations, and their experiences in the house. It would have helped with sympathising with various characters as well since Lex is actually pretty emotionless. From a character perspective, this makes sense as a way to deal with trauma, but it did make it hard to connect from a reader's point of view.

The marketing of this novel is what really lets it down. Going in expecting a thriller, it was almost impossible that I wouldn't come out of Girl A feeling a little bit disappointed. It was slower and more ephemeral than I was in the mood for, so it just left me feeling a little cold. I think Abigail Dean would have been better off writing a true crim book about the actual Turpin case rather than fictionalising it. Given the lack of detail in her narrative, it would have suited narrative non-fiction a lot better.