Reviews with content warning for Drug abuse - Girl A

I found this very disappointing in the end. I was looking forward to reading it and expected a kind of horror-esque thriller about a woman who had grown up in a House of Horror with all her siblings, but it ended up being mostly a retelling of her life with a very anticlimactic plot twist thrown in after a couple hundred pages.

The problem was that the story didn't have any suspense. It was about a woman named Lex, who had been severely abused as a child by her parents (along with her five siblings) and whose family home had thus been dubbed the "House of Horror". She learnt that her mother had died and had made her the executor of the house. She and her sister Evie planned to turn it into a place of good, but in order to do that, she needed to have her other siblings' consent.

I did like the way the story was set up itself. It only had six chapters, with each chapter being titled a different sibling and dealing with said sibling in particular. However, not only were the chapters not as in-depth about the titular sibling as you'd expect, they also switched between the past and present all the time. So you'd have a paragraph where Lex visited and talked to the sibling in question, and then a paragraph that continued telling the story of what exactly had happened in the past before Lex escaped. Which I don't think was a bad format per se, but Dean just switched between timelines way too often, it got too chaotic. There were way too many timelines. And everything was also just told so ... monotonously? Of course the things Lex talked about, especially in the flashbacks (but also some of the present-day parts), were hard to digest and made you mad with disbelief, but ... that was it? I didn't leave this book still thinking about it or reeling from it. And I think because it skipped so much, it also left the book less tense than it could've been.

Plus, this might be a nitpicky detail, but the perspectives often just didn't add up. For example, one of the chapters started with Dean talking about a detective who was assigned to Lex's case, and it felt random at first - and then it turned out that that guy was

her adoptive father

, and at the end of that story line, the perspective randomly shifted from third person into first person. And it just didn't work. It was confusing and clunky.

Then, like I mentioned, there was a plot twist toward the end of the book. It was that

Evie turned out to have been dead all this time instead of alive the way she'd been portrayed thus far.

And not only did it barely make any sense and came out of nowhere, it also wasn't a good plot twist? It felt randomly tacked on and didn't make me care much more. Dean did do a good job of showing that

Lex and Evie had been close when Evie was still alive (which was kind of weird, since they had a five-year age gap, but whatever)

, and when I was transcribing my annotations, I did notice a few foreshadowing moments, but they were very insignificant and might have just been me reading into it.

I think a reason as to why I didn't care about the plot twist was also because it came so late in the book? I didn't even expect there to be a plot twist in the first place and already accepted that the story was lame and boring, so when it finally happened, I just didn't care about it. Also, Dean didn't really do much about it? She explained what had happened and the way Lex had dealt with it, but nothing really came out of it? Usually, when a big plot twist happens, the characters do something with that information, but that wasn't the case here.

The characters were, generally, very morally grey and infuriating. Lex showed little emotion overall - almost seemed a bit robotic at times -, and Ethan made me want to murder people (specifically him). Delilah was a religious nutjob. The only genuinely good character was Gabriel, and he had been the one who'd almost been through the most (almost felt homophobic, honestly. Sure, make the one gay kid the doormat). Evie kind of disturbed me a little, tbh.

Because like I said, she was dead, but she was portrayed as being alive throughout the entire book. Dean even wrote her as bisexual. But the thing is, she was ten when she died, so a lot of the things that were described about her were things Lex must've made up. And some of them just felt uncomfortable and weird if you thought about it too hard? Like, did she just wake up one day and decided to make Evie bisexual in her head? (Not that a 10-year-old couldn't already know she was bi, but I doubt she and Lex, chained to their respective beds, would've talked openly about that, considering their father was a homophobic prick.)

Just as with the plot, I didn't particularly care about them.

I don't know why I expected more from this book. Maybe because I thought it was more bordering on horror and it wasn't? In the end, the book just felt pointless. And that made me kind of sad, tbh.

Content Warnings

adriennne's review against another edition

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dark

Diverse cast of characters? No

3.0

Content Warnings

dayday_reads's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Where to begin? I hated this book and I had super high hopes for it. I guess it's marketed as a thriller but I didn't know that, I just thought the premise sounded great. It starts off confusing, has a few bright spots, but mostly just dragged for me. So let's talk about what I didn't like:
Problem#1: the characters
I never understood what people meant about enjoying character-driven stories until now. I couldn't connect with ANY of the characters. I didn't care about them or their plight and I was uninterested and unmoved by them. This has never happened to me where there wasn't at least one character I liked. I hated all of them, including Girl A (Lexi) herself. She has issues with a capital I and although she had tons of therapy, so much i still unresolved. I won't even get in yo my issues with the rest of the siblings.

Problem #2: character development (or lack thereof)
You got no sense of who the siblings really were as people because we saw everything through Lexi's lens. So they don't have the nuance that fully developed characters do. You get glimpsed in to them but not the why's and wherefore of it all. They do provide some context and help the story along but that's about it.

Problem #3: the chapter lengths! OMG. It was like they were never-ending. At first, I thought that I had missed something but nope. They really are one great long chapter. This probably would've been okay if the perspective of the actual character the chapter was about had been presented, but no.

Problem #4: the "twists"
They actually aren't bad per se. I felt dumb for not immediately seeing the first one as it was kinda in your face all along and I had QUESTIONS that the twist answered. Should've seen it coming and when it did I flipped back through the book and went; OH. Now these things make sense. Except there's no real resolution for them. Also the last twist (at least that I noticed) just solidified my feelings regarding a certain character.

***Note: I understand that 1 & 2 are very similar and related but I feel like in this case, they are two separate issues***

Now for the good: I didn't enjoy my time with this book so I don't have much good to say. It is a character study in trauma, grief, PTSD and family. So there's that.

Overall, I don't think that I'd personally recommend this to anyone although lots of people have enjoyed it. Trgger and content warnings abound so be sure to check those out before reading.

Content Warnings

dorianlecter's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

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