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laurelinwonder 's review for:
Girl A
by Abigail Dean
I'm going to be honest, I finished this probably a week ago but I've had such a book hangover. I've actually read two more books and started two more since finishing this, but I wasn't ready to articulate my feelings yet. So here's the thing, I have watched and read a lot about cults, and people who turn to religion and then bend it to their own personal agendas And let me just start by saying this is not that book. It's not the book where you see how much this family suffers under the forceful hand of this God that this father has imagined. Instead this book looks at mental health in a really interesting way, and honestly anyone who knows anything about cults should be thinking about mental health. Because most of us don't go off the deep end, and grab a Bible and then just like lose our minds, and then talk other people into joining us into our craziness. That's not a regular occurrence, it happens more than you would think, but it's it's more than just egotism. So girl A, I adore how real she is, she's on the edge of unlikable, I liked her because she was unlikable personally, And I think that unlikable and unreliable narrators tend to be the best because of the most human. Because if we tell stories about ourselves, and we tell you a half truths, we're probably hiding something. It's for self-preservation. So if you want to book that basically it rails against religion, and it's God said this, I for and I God said that, this is not that book; and for that I am beyond grateful. I think it's very easy to just start slinging biblical language around, and using it to make people look horrible. And I think it's very easy to slip into a lot of traps when it comes to writing about this particular kind of family scenario. This book does not do that, it did not follow any of the rules, and I loved that. And by rules I mean not just in terms of how it's written, what it avoids, what it digs into, even though that's all wonderful. I also enjoy how it set up in terms of chapters, it does something really interesting that takes a hot minute to get used to but really works as a whole. It's very skillful, and sometimes you get these thrillery mystery books that are not well written, this is well done. I look forward to reading more of Dean's work in the future.