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House of horrors: Girl A, by Abigail Dean, reviewed

A much-hyped debut novel deals with the worst thing imaginable: imprisoned, tortured children hidden in plain sight.

• From magazine issue: 16 January 2021

Jenny Colgan

Abigail Dean

HarperCollins, pp. 336, £14

If the last quarter of 2020 saw a glut of novels published, of which there were winners (Richard Osman) and losers (in a just world, Piranesi would still be at number one), January is a less frenzied time for new writers to launch. Even so, there are often hyped and hot new books — among which this year Girl A is one.

It comes with excitable reports of huge international sales and an insistence that it will be everywhere . The accompanying blurb also manages to mention repeatedly that the author got a double-first at Cambridge, which, frankly, in these days of being ruled by Oxbridge inadequates who think that being there for three years means everything must be immediately handed to them, I would probably have skipped: the novel is better than the entitlement suggests.

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Girl A is a lovely, precision-tooled piece of kit. 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.

Oddly, even though it deals in an obscenity, it’s actually easier to swallow than crime novels where women and children are casually slaughtered to prove how clever the police officer is. There is nothing casual about what happens here, and the victims are the heroes, in the most difficult, compromised ways imaginable.

It’s sharp and refreshing to have a female heroine who doesn’t have to be sexy and feisty. We never even learn what Alexandra looks like, and I found, unusually, I desperately wanted to know.

The shape of the novel is neat: after the death of the mother who stood by while her children were abused, the eldest, Alexandra, (or Girl A as she is referred to in newspaper reports) has to contact her surviving siblings and work out what to do with the house in which they all suffered. We follow the children’s varying trajectories, flash back to when things got so bad, and see how the horror played itself out over the decades.

The writing is clean and compelling, the choices interesting and fully fleshed out. The flashbacks are upsetting but not torture porn. More affecting are things in the outside world Alexandra cannot understand: why people would ever stop eating at a buffet; why they wouldn’t enjoy being in hospital, or why the nurse has to keep her face turned away.

It seems odd to describe such a book as profoundly entertaining, but stories have always dealt in gore and death and this is no exception. It’s terrific: finally, an Oxbridge graduate succeeding in doing something really, really well.

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Girl A : Book summary and reviews of Girl A by Abigail Dean

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by Abigail Dean

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Published Feb 2021 352 pages Genre: Thrillers Publication Information

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Book summary.

She thought she had escaped her past. But there are some things you can't outrun.

Lex Gracie doesn't want to think about her family. She doesn't want to think about growing up in her parents' House of Horrors. And she doesn't want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped, the eldest sister who freed her older brother and four younger siblings. It's been easy enough to avoid her parents--her father never made it out of the House of Horrors he created, and her mother spent the rest of her life behind bars. But when her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can't run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the home into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her siblings--and with the childhood they shared. What begins as a propulsive tale of escape and survival becomes a gripping psychological family story about the shifting alliances and betrayals of sibling relationships--about the secrets our siblings keep, from themselves and each other. Who have each of these siblings become? How do their memories defy or galvanize Lex's own? As Lex pins each sibling down to agree to her family's final act, she discovers how potent the spell of their shared family mythology is, and who among them remains in its thrall and who has truly broken free. For readers of Room and Sharp Objects , an absorbing and psychologically immersive novel about a young girl who escapes captivity–but not the secrets that shadow the rest of her life.

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Reader reviews.

"A tour de force, beautifully written, richly imagined, and compulsively readable. Add to this its grave sometimes ominous tone, and the result is unforgettable." - Booklist (Starred Review) "[Dean] skillfully brings the complicated relationships among the siblings as well as the secrets they share into dramatic relief. This assured psychological thriller marks Dean as a writer to watch." - Publishers Weekly "Abigail Dean wastes no time diving into the wreckage of the Gracie clan... [ Girl A ] often reads more like a slow-burn character study, though it's richer for it." - Entertainment Weekly "The height of a pandemic might not be the ideal time to read a novel about six English children held captive at home and abused by their deranged parents. But put your fears aside or you'll miss out on a stunning debut...compelling."- Washington Post "A riveting page-turner, full of hope in the face of despair." - The Guardian (UK) "A novel that's psychologically astute and written with flair. In the traditional new year battle between much touted first thrillers it's the clear winner." - Sunday Times (UK) "The biggest mystery thriller since Gone Girl ." - Elle (UK) "This gripping story about family dynamics and the nature of human psychology will hold you tight all the way through." - Good Housekeeping "Nothing short of astonishing... Rarely does a novel offer up such unique plotting, such heart-stopping psychological drama, and such a rich portrayal of its inhabitants. A modern-day classic." - Jeffery Deaver, New York Times bestselling author of The Goodbye Man and The Bone Collector "Fantastic, I loved it." - Paula Hawkins, New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train "It is rare for a novel to be so deft yet devastating. A story of terrible control but also irresistible humanity, Girl A is a portrait of survival, intelligence and love, and it will stay with me for a long time. A book of deep feeling, and an astonishing achievement." - Jessie Burton, author of the New York Times bestseller The Miniaturist " Girl A is truly my idea of the perfect book: gripping and beautifully written, with complex (and often chilling) characters that are fully realised, and hard to forget. I'll be thinking about this for a long, long time, so… Believe the hype – it really is that good." - Katie Lowe, author of The Furies "A searing, gripping tale of love, loss and survival that exposes the bare bones of humanity and explores how victims cope long after the headlines stop rolling. One of the most compelling novels I've read in a long time." - Stacey Halls, author of The Familiars and The Foundling "Terrifyingly gripping." - Susie Steiner, author of Missing, Presumed and Persons Unknown "Emotionally complex and beautifully written, with shades of Gillian Flynn and Ali Land, the dark secrets of Girl A unfold with such cool confidence that I kept having to remind myself that this was a debut. Incredibly impressive." - Catherine Ryan Howard, author of The Nothing Man

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Author Information

Abigail dean.

Abigail Dean works as a lawyer for Google, and before that was a bookseller. She lives in London, and is working on her second novel.

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Book Review: Girl A by Abigail Dean

By gabino iglesias.

There’s something about dark narratives about dysfunctional families that pulls readers in. It probably stems from a sense of empathy mixed with familiarity. However, some stories take dysfunction into places so dark and dangerous that readers aren’t pulled in; they’re brutally dragged. Abigail Dean’s Girl A belongs to this second group. A crushing tale that delves into the horrors of a devastating past and explores its impact on the present, this novel explores the very unique and complicated world of siblings coping with shared trauma.

Lex Gracie was lucky enough to escape a horrible childhood, so she doesn’t like thinking about her family. Instead of a regular life growing up, Lex and her five siblings grew up as prisoners of two sadistic parents who kept them locked in and under awful conditions. They were hungry and cold. In fact, she was cold so often that her body started growing hair to keep her warm. Lex, known as Girl A, managed to escape and saved her siblings in the process, but none of them really escaped the damage done by those years of abuse and deprivation. Lex’s father stayed in the horrible house, but her mother spent the rest of her life in prison. When the mother dies, Lex and her siblings get the house as inheritance. Together with her sister Evie, Lex wants to turn the evil house into a force of good, a space for children and art.  However, before that happens, the siblings will have to get through the scars they carry and learn to cope with their past, their differences, the secrets they keep from each other, and their shifting alliances. 

Girl A is a brutal look at a family whose history is as inescapable as it is horrible. The siblings wants to move forward, but having the house and Lex’s desire to do something with it will stir up memories that hurt, dark things that reach out form the past to affect who those kids grew up to be. Dean’s prose is stylish, but she pulls no punches and every time the narrative goes back in time, she ensures the horrifying atmosphere of the kids’ lives is seen on the page. 

This novel inhabits two different times. The first is the present, when Lex is forced to deal with the realities of being names her mother’s executor after her death in prison. She’s an adult woman who has done her best to move forward, but the scars of her childhood are still visible in her thoughts and demeanor, especially in the way she remembers her mother. Whenever the narrative is in this contemporary space, the prose is tense and dialogue carries a lot of the action, but it clear that the past is always present in some way. However, when the narrative inhabits the past—which makes it the present—the fear, isolation, and confusion are almost palpable. Lex is forced to deal with a horrendous reality in which everyday occurrences and minor problems are exacerbated by her situation. When this happens, Dean’s sharp, first person prose gets to the core of things unflinchingly, and that makes many passages memorable:

“My period posed a more significant problem. It came when I was ten; I had expected another few years to prepare myself. We had been informed, by a video in school, of the practicalities: the blood, the cramping, the sanitary products. It had seemed sterile and simple. Now I stood in the bath, half-naked and baffled. Nobody had mentioned the smell, or the clots, or what you were meant to do with one shower a week. I tried to reassure myself, in the same stern tone taken by the actress in the school video. It was a problem, and like any other, it would have a solution. For the time being, I lined my knickers with toilet paper and prayed. I was unconvinced about God’s credentials in this particular sector. I would need a better plan.” 

There are places where descriptions of places or Lex’s thoughts slightly bog down the narrative, but the strength of the writing makes even those slower moments enjoyable. Girl A is extremely bleak, but its bleakness never becomes overpowering and the story is gripping, so the pages keep flying even when things get extremely dark. This great debut announces the arrival of a strong new voice in psychological thrillers that’s not afraid to go into the shadowy corners where bad things happen…and their memories remain.

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If your car has defrosted vents on your side windows and side mirrors, turn them on as well.

It may take a few minutes for the air coming out to warm up.

This is my favorite book! I was so carried away by reading it that I completely forgot about studying. My parents are angry because my grades have deteriorated so much. I do not want to upset them, and I think that I will need the help of special services. A friend of mine recommends one good service and says that it will definitely help me.

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Book Review: Girl A by Abigail Dean

Each chapter is dedicated to one of the siblings, named in turn, starkly drawn by Lex’s observations, about their relationships, betrayals, guilt. After their escape, each sibling is put in a different adoptive home, their various fates weighted by the question of luck. They have all survived, but to what extent? At what cost? Noah, the baby, gets to grow up unaware of his past. Ethan, the eldest, capitalizes on his family’s trauma, writing articles about forgiveness. Gabriel is “troubled,” and Delilah curiously shows no outward signs of lingering trauma. Lex, the titular “Girl A” who was the first to escape, still has memories of her flight like “half remembered dreams” that wake her in the night.

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. It is sometimes frustrating, but this feels deliberate, too, as another aspect of Lex on the page. As children, Lex and her siblings had watched their parents cover the clocks and windows of the house, a disorienting abuse technique that leaves her grasp on time shaky into adulthood. She often has trouble gauging the passage of time, or loses time completely, a common experience of trauma survivors, and that uneasy grasp of time is reflected in the seesawing structure until its sudden catapulting of tension halfway through the narrative.

Still, for all its darkness, there is tenderness, small moments of happiness between Lex and her adoptive father are welcome spots of light in these pages, but they do not “fix” her. That was, for me, the most startling element of this book. I found myself waiting with each chapter and turn for Lex’s pain to be made palatable, digestible for a general audience unused to the burden of trauma, but Dean’s writing holds no quarter for such things. She looks at a child tied to a bed, deprived of food, and she honors the very real consequences of those acts.

When Lex escaped, she ran through the quiet streets around her house, screaming, “trying to summon [neighbors] from their living rooms, from their sofas, from the evening news,” desperate to be seen. This book, too, tries to rouse its readers, begging us not to look away. Even when it’s painful. Girl A is by no means a light read. It is emotionally taxing, it is difficult, and it is devastatingly beautiful.

Publication Date: February 2nd, 2021

Publisher: Viking

Reviewed by Dan Mazzacane

New Voices: "Smith" by Rob Franklin

New voices: "rip your throat out" by will ejzak.

Book Review: Girl A

By Sarah Tyson

Tucked up on the ridged area between Lancashire and Yorkshire lies a bleak landscape known to a few hardy fell-runners, the hillwalkers who trudge the Pennine Way footpath and the sheep who inhabit the peaty moorland above the treeline. Motorists on the M62 who traverse it between Halifax and Rochdale remember that this has been serial killer territory; a perfect location for burying bodies. This area is familiar to writer Abigail Dean , who like me grew up in the Peak District, and is the one that she has fittingly chosen for the setting of her debut psychological thriller, Girl A.

Imagine, in this geographical setting, a family living in an isolated house beyond a village where bad things happen behind closed doors. So bad that a one child (Girl A) escapes and runs away to get help for her siblings. Understanding and picturing the environment compounds the sense of concern the reader feels for the Girl A and her brothers and sisters, knowing that any cries for help will be lost to the wind.

As versions of the narrative unfold through the voices of each of the seven children the reader gains a little more insight into the events of the past in a tantalisingly ‘drip drip’ vein. But it is the vague, sometimes confusing, sometimes ambiguous descriptions that add to the tension and the burning question of how the local community could have ignored the warning signs about the household for as long as it did?

The author has created an intricately woven story that flashes backwards and forwards between events of the past and now. Girl A is an intelligent, resilient, courageous person who invites empathy, but there is a steeliness to her that ought to be expected from a survivor. Understandably the relationships she has with her siblings are complex and the dynamics she has with them and other characters are intriguing. Throughout the book you are trying to work out exactly what horrors were experienced at that address and whether all the children were the victims of violence, or if some were actually facilitators or perhaps perpetrators…

If you like dark. If you like tense. If you like to be kept guessing you will love this book. Girl A is published by Harper Collins .

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Book review: Girl A by Abigail Dean

There’s been a bit of buzz around Girl A by Abigail Dean. That can be both a good and bad thing. I read it earlier than planned as I was excited about it, but at the same time I probably had heightened expectations as a result.

For much of this book I wasn’t sure if I was reading about a cult, or about kidnapped children. Dean keeps it pretty vague for a while and readers are on edge, recognising that we don’t have the full story. Waiting for more.

Lex Gracie doesn’t want to think about her family. She doesn’t want to think about growing up in her parents’ House of Horrors. And she doesn’t want to think about her identity as Girl A: the girl who escaped. When her mother dies in prison and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, she can’t run from her past any longer. Together with her sister, Evie, Lex intends to turn the House of Horrors into a force for good. But first she must come to terms with her six siblings – and with the childhood they shared.

The book is narrated by Alexandra (Lex), Girl A. We learn the children were known as, Boys A – D and Girls A – C. In order of age. After their rescue fifteen years earlier attempts were made to keep their identities secret and lives private, but though some like Lex preferred anonymity, some opted to live firmly ‘in’ the spotlight.

I spent much of the book wondering why Lex and her family had attracted so much attention, and I know it sounds terrible that I wanted more trauma than initially offered. There’s mention of the kids being chained up at some point but for much of their childhood it seemed they (just) lived with an incredibly strict delusional father and a subservient mother.

I couldn’t entirely understand how the Gracie family was viewed with such horror. And in some ways it’s probably a lesson in extremism. How someone (‘Father’ in this instance) who’s very religious and rigid and in his beliefs—which he is in their younger years—can be influenced by others and those traits magnified to terrorise those around them.

So eventually we get some more insight into Father’s disintegration as his disappointments mount and understand how dire the last couple of years of the kids’ lives were in the Gracie house of horrors.

And of course we also learn more about Lex and her siblings. How they dealt with ‘life’ with Mother and Father and how they thrived – or otherwise – after they were freed. There’s something really interesting about the way each of the siblings handle what’s happened to them and who they’ve become as a result.

I must confess the layout confused me a little at times, as Dean introduces a new sibling and there’s usually a flashback. Sometimes however some of that is from Lex’s point of view (as a child) or we’ve switched back to Lex in the present and it’s not been clear. I’m not sure if it’s as simple as layout or formatting. I was really only confused once or twice when something didn’t make sense and I had to re-read it and realise the memory had finished and we were back in the present.

Dean writes well and her background in law means that element (and Lex’s world) feels realistic. But it took a very long time for me to get really engaged in this book. It’s an enjoyable read but I think I’d introduce more of the detail about the family’s final years earlier, even just via more references to how bad things get, so there’s more of a sense of menace or dread. Of course whether that makes what comes more powerful or whether it means it’s too little too late might vary from reader to reader.

There’s a great twist towards the end and I’d certainly keep that there as it’s quite shocking and Dean does a good job at having the now and then meet at the perfect time. However, because I enthusiastically read this a while ago I went back to some of the earlier chapters to re-read them to write this review. In retrospect, now that I know the twist I would probably suggest some changes to formatting of earlier chapters. I feel like we should be able to go back and re-read it knowing the whole context and realise we were fooled, rather than have it not make sense. Again however, that’s only on re-reading and not something you’d be aware of at the time.

Girl A by Abigail Dean will be published in Australia by Harper Collins and available from 20 January 2021.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes. 

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Hi, I’m Deborah… a seachanger living on Australia’s Fraser Coast, in Queensland. I write about books and life in general.

Books on the 7:47

Book review blog / author interviews / all things bookish, review: girl a by abigail dean.

• by Jen | Books on the 7:47
• Posted on January 20, 2021 June 16, 2021

All you need to know is: I devoured Girl A in a weekend. I just couldn’t stop reading this fantastic debut from Abigail Dean. It’s a psychological thriller with depth and drive. Some parts were very difficult to read but you just HAD to keep turning those pages to hear Girl A’s story.

Opening sentence: You don’t know me, but you’ll have seen my face.

Meet Girl A

The story opens with Lex Gracie (Girl A) having been made executive of her mother’s will after her mother dies in prison. Lex and her siblings are infamous for unpleasant reasons: they were held captive in their home, abused and starved by their parents. Their father ended his own life when Lex escaped aged 15 and raised the alarm. Their mother ended up in prison.

‘She wrote to you many times in those years,’ she said. ‘To you and to Ethan and to Delilah. I heard about you all. Gabriel and Noah. Sometimes she wrote to Daniel and Evie.’

What we then get is a really interesting story about what happens to people who have had an experience like this in their childhood. Each child reacts differently, remembers what happened in an individual way and are doing what they can as adults to thrive or just survive.

There are chapters about each sibling, all told through Lex’s POV, set both in the present day and in flashbacks that reveal what happened to lead their parents to commit such terrible acts against their own children. This was an excellently crafted part of the story. The abuse happened gradually, over years, to the point where, by the time it hit extreme levels, it was too late for Lex and her siblings to do anything.

Why didn’t you just leave when you had the chance?

Lex is the second eldest sibling and a damaged and complex character. Determined not to let what happened to her stop her succeeding in life, yet unable to stop the psychological damage that come with an experience. She is strong and resilient and wonderfully written.

Real-life inspiration

I have always been morbidly fascinated and appalled by real-life stories like this. I think it’s the level of corrupt human nature – I just can’t fathom that people exist who would do this. Prior to reading Girl A , I had heard of the Turpin family – a mother and father who abused and neglected their 12 children, truly horrific to read about. Author Abigail Dean says in this interview that she was partially inspired by this case.

Also, a book that sprung to mind while reading Girl A was Educated by Tara Westover. Not fiction – and not to the extreme levels of the story that Girl A tells – Educated is a memoir that details Tara’s life with her religious-zealot father who tries to contain and control his children.

The traumatic theme of Girl A is not the easiest to read about but the way Abigail Dean tells this story is wildly compelling. It is a dive into the deprived depths of human nature and the consequences for the people who are victims in that. I was totally immersed in this story and I know it will stay with me for a long time.

• Get your copy here
• Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC;
• Published by  HarperCollins  21st January 2021;

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Girl A by Abigail Dean

In Reviews by Aster March 9, 2021 8 Comments

Lex Gracie does not like thinking about her family. She does not like thinking about her past and she especially does not like thinking about her title of Girl A: the one who escaped and freed her siblings from the House of Horrors.

Life has continued for Lex and she has done a decent job avoiding her past including her parents, which is easy enough when one is dead and the other is imprisoned but when her mother dies and leaves Lex and her siblings the family home, Lex is forced to face her past.

She is determined to turn the Horrors into something good but to start she must find her siblings. Who have they become? And what did the House of Horrors do to them all?

| Why Girl A   Is Worth Your Time

To preface, this is my longest review out and no, I do not understand why.  Girl A  by Abigail Dean is a light read despite revolving around child abuse, death, and mutilation. The Gracie children, three girls and four boys of varying ages, have grown up in a household with an increasingly abusive and insane Father. Girl A as the title suggests is the girl you follow in the story and this is a novel about a survivors journey afterward, not the horrors they faced. I think you will enjoy this novel if you want something directed towards post-recovery of abuse that is creepy but not that creepy within the context of the thriller genre.

This novel almost was a hit or miss because the premise is quite foreboding and suggests to the reader a much more dramatic and gut-wrenching story is in store but no, there is little cruelty and instead more introspective scenes. I determined this is actually a hit and worth your time because I find value in journey based stories and think others do too. This is a journey based thriller, not an insanity based thriller and in all is worth your time if you want a novel with a lighter thriller based concept whilst still remaining in that genre.

| Plot Progression

Girl A, aka Lex, is the protagonist of the novel. She is the eldest female and second oldest sibling who escaped and called the authorities. The plot is told with three types of narratives: Lex's general viewpoint, her interaction with her siblings which although told in present day still has a different writing style to it and flashbacks of her childhood and how it slowly decayed.

The plot has flaws, they are easy to spot if you read this. It lacks certain punch where needed and for a thriller, is a bit lacklustre with how nail biting it should have been. Maybe this is intentional and the dismissal or downplay of the torture the siblings faced is a coping mechanism for the protagonist or the plot may have benefitted from going a bit more deeply into how the past shaped the characters.

The plot based on how you see the above dilemma is either enjoyable or not. I found it enjoyable as the story really is more about Lex's journey after than the before. I found this plot to be solid and overall worth your time.

| Characters

The seven siblings are the focus of the novel with Lex leading the narrative. Lex is intelligent and a strong-willed individual who was classified Girl A the day of their rescue. There is Delilah - Girl B. Evie - Girl C. Ethan - Boy A and the oldest sibling. Gabriel - Boy B, Daniel - Boy C, and lastly Noah - Boy D. Seven siblings all with vastly different personality and growth after the rescue. I think how the siblings were written encapsulates multiple roads recovery can lead to and was understandable based on who the siblings were instead of just being a symbol of a path that could be taken. What I valued in the characters is that who they are shaped their future, not just their imprisonment.

Now, don't forget the parents. Father and Mother as they are called and you will have to make your own judgment call on them.

Outside of the Gracie family, there are also Lex's friends, psychiatrist, and employers. They are solid but not at the forefront of the story. In all, decent characters, well developed. I liked them and in the spoiler section will talk quite in depth about them and what I thought because I do have lots to say.

Main Genre | Thriller

Year Published | 2021

Rating | 6.5 / 10

Worth Your Time? Yes.

| My Thoughts

Warning: skip my thoughts for a spoiler free review..

I grew to hate and then appreciate  Girl A.  This is because I hated the ending and what happened to Evie and then I grew to recognise the complexity of the ending and what happened to Evie. I do not mind the ending as to me it demonstrates trauma is always a part of you and some days are better than others and some are worse. I liked the ambiguity of the ending and I liked who Lex the character was.

Can we quickly talk about Ethan? I have mixed feelings for this characters. Did he have Stockholm syndrome? Was he too terrified to go to the authorities because he had been compliant for too long? Or did he secretly like it? He had much more freedom than the other siblings, he held down one of his siblings during a beating and leads me to wonder who Ethan is at the core. I am not sure about Ethan morally but I do feel that the Mother had Stockholm syndrome and/or is a victim of domestic abuse leading her to not be able to call for help. She, I sympathised with but Ethan, I am not sure what to think. What do you think about Ethan?

Lastly, Evie. That in a twisted way was my favourite part of the novel because I did not expect it to happen. It added more complexity to Lex as a character, it demonstrated to me that Lex has being carrying Evie with her her whole life and I hope that the ending was Lex letting her finally be at peace and accepting the death instead of the alternative. The ending could have been representative of Evie saying goodbye or Evie beckoning Lex to join her. Quite interesting and ambiguous, really allows you as a reader to decide what happens.

That is why I put  Girl A  as a hit. I liked all of the questions that arose when I read this because it helped push a narrative regarding growth and allowed me as a reader to choose what I thought that narrative was. If you have read  Girl A , let me know and we can discuss it in the comments below!

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I thought Girl A was very well-done. As someone who works in child welfare and has some background in trauma specifically, the disconnection from emotion is a very common aspect of survivors. The brain simply can’t process all of that trauma, which is why the children each have their own fiction that they believe. I think that just as Lex’s fiction is that Evie survived, Ethan’s fiction is that he did everything he could to get them out of the situation. There is an alternate interpretation that he was enjoying what was happening, and it’s hard to know from the outside. But I believe he could have blocked the memory of holding down Gabriel. The bursts of anger are extremely consistent with someone whose brain is being confronted with the discrepancies in a story it’s already rewritten.

What a solid comment to receive. I like your comment about the multiple alternatives to Ethan’s response to the situation, there is no guarantee what he perceived happening versus what Lex perceives as we never hear his viewpoint.

To me this book was memorable and has stayed with me. A few of my thoughts about some of the more ambiguous portions–I personally interpreted the ending to mean not that Lex was about to commit suicide, but that Evie would always be a part of her, no matter the state of Lex’s recovery. The father’s suicide–my thought was that he knew he had lost control, and probably in spite of his insanity felt a sense of guilt. One question I had was after the book of Greek myths was discovered–Lex ‘s father hit her in the stomach, but did he also sexually assault her as part of her punishment? I re-read that section and wondered if that may have been what happened, which perhaps would account for her preference to be hurt by her lovers, and possibly a lack of ability to have children.

hi, i recently finished this book and i scoured the depths of the internet looking for a comment like yours. because throughout the whole book i kept thinking that Noah was Lex’s son. i was lent a copy so i cant look it up, but i don’t remember that the mother was pregnant again after Daniel. also, there is some recurrent “the body remembers” narrative and the way Lex is nearly obsessed and also soft regarding Noah, Noah’s mum so protective… i do think, if that would be the case, that Ethan sexually assaulted her; hence the choking at his house, the hate that Dr. K has for him, and the tensions regarding the wedding. finally, it ties together with the idea of Lex not being able to have children if she suffered from a botched at home birth with awful consecuences. am i crazy? maybe. still! i had that deep conviction and i wanted to share.

I found the book highly overrated and very difficult to read. Call it realism or bleak topic or the natural consequence of what transpired. Whatever the reason, the characters are all utterly unlikable, including the protagonist. Lex had every reason to hate her mother, but before you even understand why, you learn that she couldn’t care less if her mother is dead. It rubbed me the wrong way in the opening chapter. There’s almost no emotion throughout the narration. The only exception is Evie’s story, whose character and relationship with Lex saves the book in my opinion. But that’s some 3/4th into the novel when I felt the first twinge of emotion and sorrow. The ending is very anticlimactic and falls flat. Nothing happens at the wedding, no reckoning with Ethan. The last paragraphs are too ambiguous for my taste. It clearly circles back to Evie, but what happens is anyone’s guess.

I agree with your point regarding the book being tough to read. I recall when reading that I found the separation between past and present confusing and it took a while for me to figure out the flow between before and after. And yes, many characters are highly unlikeable *coughs* Ethan *coughs* but, I overall found Lex to be a complex character and enjoyed the ambiguous ending. A good thriller that does complex emotion well that you may enjoy is We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker or if you want something a bit more in your face suspenseful with familial bonds as a key component of the novel, House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland is a great option. It is a bit more fantasy based but such a good book that I am going to recommend it anyway and overall hope one of those reads are more enjoyable for you than Girl A .

I just finished this book, too. I agree with all your thoughts. I liked the ending, and I guess that’s because of the ambiguity. Lex is an excellent character, and in fact all the characters are very complex and well developed. Of course, the grim description of the abuse did make me wonder about my own sanity that I would read this book of fiction. I do like thriller and psychological suspense, and this has definite elements of surprise, so it was true to the genre in that way, but other than the revelation about Daniel and evie’s deaths, there were not too many shocks. In fact, I kept anticipating some worse revelation about sexual abuse, which I’m glad never came. One of the flaws is that father seemed quite delusional and perhaps psychotic, and it is hard to imagine that he was organized enough to plan for discovery and had a lethal poison available at all times for himself. It is the one thing that doesn’t seem to make sense. I can’t imagine with his delusions, religious fanaticism and ego thinking that he should commit suicide, and I can’t imagine him being able to plan ahead at all. He wasn’t very functional by the end. Death by cop, in some hostage / blockade situation would make more sense to me. I would have also believed a murder/suicide attempt more than his own lethal poison ingestion.

What an insightful comment, I agree with your thoughts on the Father. I feel his demise would have made more sense if it was by someone else as the novel never indicated him to be one that planned ahead. Great points, glad you enjoyed the book regardless!

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Good Girls by Hadley Freeman review – anorexia from within

The journalist and former in-patient offers a clear-eyed view of a debilitating and misunderstood illness

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Hadley Freeman was 14 when a seemingly innocuous comment blew her life apart. Three years earlier her family had relocated from New York to London, and she enjoyed the special status that being American conferred on her among her British peers. But she struggled to find her place among teenage girls who were embracing bras and boys – “The grown-up world was pressing in, monsters making the door bulge inwards while I frantically tried to push it back.”

On this particular day, Freeman was in a PE lesson at school, sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, next to a girl named Lizzie. Noting Lizzie’s skinny legs, and her own “matronly trunks”, she asked Lizzie if it was hard to find clothes when you’re small. “Yeah,” she replied. “I wish I was normal like you.” At this, Freeman writes, “a black tunnel yawned open inside me, and I tumbled down it, Alice into Nowhereland. ‘Normal.’ Not ‘slim’, not ‘thin’ – ‘normal’. Normal was average. Normal was boring. Normal was nothing.”

Doctors often call the moments that set off anorexia in patients the “precipitant”. They are impossible to predict and, in isolation, cannot be held responsible for the illness taking hold because, as Freeman notes, “anorexia was a bomb inside us, just waiting for the right time, the single flame, the trigger”. After that fateful PE lesson, Freeman’s fall was “instantaneous and vertiginous” . She stopped eating, exercised obsessively and lost her capacity to feel joy. She would spend the next three years in and out of psychiatric institutions where she and her fellow patients would go toe-to-toe with staff over food. At one stage, Freeman’s mother was told to prepare for her death.

Good Girls, then, is her clear-eyed, sometimes upsetting but also bleakly funny account of this most slippery illness and what it feels like from the inside. Anorexia remains one of the most discussed and least understood mental disorders , so there is no underestimating the value of a former sufferer able to articulate the thought processes behind self-starvation. For Freeman – formerly a Guardian columnist and author of the family memoir House of Glass – anorexia was a way of shrinking and simplifying her world. There is no need to worry about school work, or what clothes to wear, if your sole responsibility is not to eat. Along with depicting the isolation, deep sadness and horrifying self-hatred, she reveals the “fierce fire” that often erupts from the sufferer when pressed to eat: “When it was in me, I was Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters, possessed by the ancient demigod: ‘There is no Dana, there is only Zuul’.”

Elsewhere, she looks at the commonalities between anorexia and autism, and anorexia and gender dysphoria, and paints a troubling picture of today’s young girls who are at the receiving end of damaging messages about womanhood and among whom rates of self-harm have tripled since 2000.

Freeman also clears up some of the misconceptions about anorexia: that it is solely about a desire to appear thin (“Anorexics don’t want to look like models in magazines. They want to look ill”); that it is cured once the patient has been persuaded to eat; that parents, in particular mothers, are to blame. The author has nothing but compassion for those devastated parents who look on helplessly as their child self-destructs. “Just because your daughter develops anorexia, it does not mean you’ve failed as a parent,” she notes. “I wish I could paint that in red across the sky.”

Over time, Freeman’s desire to starve herself abated, though new problems replaced it, including OCD that made her wash her hands raw and, in her 20s, cocaine addiction. It was motherhood in her late 30s that signalled a turning point in how she viewed herself and her body, although she is careful to point out that children do not cure eating disorders. Now, she says, it still feels “like an hourly miracle to be free of the cold and the hopelessness and the loneliness and the palpitations and the exhaustion and the exercising and the guilt. But even though I’m free of it, I will never forget it.”

• Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia by Hadley Freeman is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply .

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Girl A: A Novel Kindle Edition

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Penguin Books
• Publication date February 2, 2021
• File size 4793 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

You don't know me, but you'll have seen my face. In the earlier pictures, they bludgeoned our features with pixels, right down to our waists; even our hair was too distinctive to disclose. But the story and its protectors grew weary, and in the danker corners of the Internet we became easy to find. The favored photograph was taken in front of the house on Moor Woods Road, early on a September evening. We had filed out and lined up, six of us in height order and Noah in Ethan's arms, while Father arranged the composition. Little white wraiths squirming in the sunshine. Behind us, the house rested in the last of the day's light, shadows spreading from the windows and the door. We were still and looking at the camera. It should have been perfect. But just before Father pressed the button, Evie squeezed my hand and turned up her face toward me; in the photograph, she is just about to speak, and my smile is starting to curl. I don't remember what she said, but I'm quite sure that we paid for it, later.

I arrived at the prison in the midafternoon. On the drive I had been listening to an old playlist made by JP, Have a Great Day, and without the music and the engine, the car was abruptly quiet. I opened the door. Traffic was building on the motorway, the noise of it like the ocean.

The prison had released a short statement confirming Mother's death. I read the articles online the evening before, which were perfunctory, and which all concluded with a variation of the same happy ending: the Gracie children, some of whom have waived their anonymity, are believed to be well. I sat in a towel on the hotel bed with room service on my lap, laughing. At breakfast, there was a stack of local newspapers next to the coffee; Mother was on the front page, underneath an article about a stabbing at Wimpy Burger. A quiet day.

My room included a hot buffet, and I kept eating right up until the end, when the waitress told me that the kitchen had to begin preparing for lunch.

"People stop for lunch?" I asked.

"You'd be surprised," she said. She looked apologetic. "Lunch isn't included with the room, though."

"That's okay," I said. "Thanks. That was really good."

When I started my job, my mentor, Julia Devlin, told me that the time would come when I would tire of free food and free alcohol; when my fascination with platters of immaculate canapŽs would wane; when I would no longer set my alarm to get to a hotel breakfast. Devlin was right about a lot of things, but not about that.

I had never been to the prison before, but it wasn't so different from what I had imagined. Beyond the car park were white walls, crowned with barbed wire, like a challenge from a fairy tale. Behind that, four towers presided over a concrete moat, with a gray fort at its center. Mother's little life. I had parked too far away and had to walk across a sea of empty spaces, following the thick white lines where I could. There was only one other car in the lot, and inside it there was an old woman, clutching the wheel. When she saw me, she raised her hand, as if we might know each other, and I waved back.

Underfoot, the tarmac was starting to stick. By the time I reached the entrance, I could feel sweat in my bra and in the hair at the back of my neck. My summer clothes were in a wardrobe in New York. I had remembered English summers as timid, and every time I stepped outside, I was surprised by bold blue sky. I had spent some time that morning thinking about what to wear, stuck, half-dressed, in the wardrobe mirror; there really wasn't an outfit for every occasion, after all. I had settled on a white shirt, loose jeans, shop-clean trainers, obnoxious sunglasses. Is it too jovial? I asked Olivia, texting her a picture, but she was in Italy, at a wedding on the walls of Volterra, and she didn't reply.

There was a receptionist, just like in any other office. "Do you have an appointment?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "With the warden."

"With the director?"

"Sure. With the director."

"Are you Alexandra?"

"That's me."

The warden had agreed to meet me in the entrance hall. "There's a reduced staff on Saturday afternoons," she had said. "And no visitors after three p.m. It should be quiet for you."

"I'd like that," I said. "Thanks."

"I shouldn't say this," she said, "but it would be the time for the great escape."

Now she came down the corridor, filling it. I had read about her online. She was the country's first female warden of a high-security facility, and she had given a few interviews after her appointment. She had wanted to be a police officer at a time when height restrictions were still in force, and she was two inches under. She had discovered that she was still tall enough to be a prison officer, which was illogical, but okay with her. She wore an electric blue suit-I recognized it from the pictures accompanying the interviews-and strange, dainty shoes, as if somebody had told her they might soften her impression. She believed-absolutely-in the power of rehabilitation. She looked more tired than in her photographs.

"Alexandra," she said, and shook my hand. "I'm so sorry for your loss."

"I'm not," I said. "So don't worry about it."

She gestured back from where she had come. "I'm just by the visitors' center," she said. "Please."

The corridor was a tepid yellow, scuffed at the baseboards and decorated with shriveled posters about pregnancy and meditation. At the end there was a scanner, as well as a conveyor belt for your belongings. Steel lockers to the ceiling. "Formalities," she said. "At least it's not busy."

"Like an airport," I said. I thought of the service in New York, two days before: my laptop and phones in a gray tray and the neat, transparent bag of makeup that I set beside them. There were special lanes for frequent flyers, and I never had to queue.

"Just like that," she said. "Yes."

She unloaded her pockets onto the conveyor belt and passed through the scanner. She carried a security pass, a pink fan, and a children's sunscreen. "A whole family of redheads," she said. "We're not built for days like this." In her pass photograph she looked like a teenager, eager to begin her first day of work. My pockets were empty. I followed her straight through.

Inside, too, there was no one around. We walked through the visitors' center, where the plastic tables and secured chairs awaited the next session. At the end of the room was a metal door, without windows; somewhere behind that, I assumed, was Mother and the confines of each of her small days. I touched a chair as we passed and thought of my siblings, waiting in the stale room for Mother to be presented to them. Delilah would have reclined here, on many occasions, and Ethan had visited once, although only for the nobility of it. He had written a piece for The Sunday Times afterward, titled "The Problems with Forgiveness," which were many and predictable.

The warden's office was through a different door. She touched her pass to the wall and patted herself down for a final key. It was in the pocket above her heart, attached to a plastic frame that held a photo full of redheaded children. "Well," she said. "Here we are."

It was a simple office, with pockmarked walls and a view to the motorway. She seemed to have recognized this and decided that it wouldn't do; she had brought in a stern wooden desk and an office chair, and she had found a budget for two leather sofas, which she would need for delicate conversations. On the walls were her certificates and a map of the United Kingdom.

"I know that we haven't met before," the warden said, "but there's something I want to say to you before the lawyer joins us."

She gestured to the sofas. I despised formal meetings on comfortable furniture; it was impossible to know how to sit. On the table in front of us was a cardboard box and a slim brown envelope bearing Mother's name.

"I hope that you don't think that this is unprofessional," the warden said, "but I remember you and your family on the news at the time. My children were just babies then. I've thought about those headlines a lot since, even before this job came up. You see a great many things in this line of work. Both the things that make the papers and the things that don't. And after all this time, some of those things-a very small number-surprise me. People say: How can you still be surprised, even now? Well, I refuse not to be surprised."

She took her fan from the pocket of her suit. Closer, it looked like something handmade by a child, or possibly by a prisoner. "Your parents surprised me," she said.

I looked past her. The sun teetered at the edge of the window, about to fall into the room.

"It was a terrible thing that happened to you," she said. "From all of us here-we hope that you might find some peace."

"Should we talk," I said, "about why you called me?"

The solicitor was poised outside the office, like an actor waiting for his cue. He was dressed in a gray suit and a cheerful tie, and sweating. The leather squeaked when he sat down. "Bill," he said, and stood again to shake my hand. The top of his collar had started to stain, and now that was gray, too. "I understand," he said, right away, "that you're also a lawyer." He was younger than I had expected, maybe younger than me; we could have studied at the same time.

"Just company stuff," I said, and to make him feel better: "I don't know the first thing about wills."

"That," Bill said, "is what I'm here for."

I smiled, encouragingly.

"Okay!" Bill said, and rapped the cardboard box. "These are the personal possessions," he said. "And this is the document."

He slid the envelope across the table, and I tore it open. The will read, in Mother's trembling hand, that Deborah Gracie appointed her daughter Alexandra Gracie as executor of this will; that Deborah Gracie's remaining possessions consisted of, first, those possessions held at HM Prison Northwood; second, approximately twenty thousand pounds inherited from her husband, Charles Gracie, upon his death; and third, the property found at 11 Moor Woods Road, in Hollowfield. Those possessions were to be divided equally among Deborah Gracie's surviving children.

"Executor," I said.

"She seemed quite sure that you were the person for the job," Bill said.

See Mother in her cell, playing with her long, long blond hair, right down to her knees; so long that she could sit on it, as a party trick. She considers her will, presided over by Bill, who feels sorry for her, who is happy to help out, and who is sweating then, too. There is so much that he wants to ask. Mother holds the pen in her hand and trembles in studied desolation. Executor, Bill explains. It's something of an honor. But it's also an administrative burden, and there will need to be communications with the various beneficiaries. Mother, with the cancer bubbling in her stomach and only a few months left to fuck us over, knows exactly whom to appoint.

"There is no obligation for you to take this up," Bill said. "If you don't want to."

"I'm aware of that," I said, and Bill's shoulders shifted.

"I can guide you through the basics," he said. "It's a very small portfolio of assets. It shouldn't take up too much of your time. The key thing-the thing that I'd bear in mind-is to get the beneficiaries' agreement. However you decide to handle those assets, you get your siblings' go-ahead first."

I was booked on a flight back to New York the next afternoon. I thought of the cold air on the plane and the neat menus that were handed out just after takeoff. I could see myself settling into the journey, the prior three days deadened by the drinks in the lounge, and waking up to the warm evening and a black car waiting to take me home.

"I need to consider it," I said. "It's not a convenient time."

Bill handed me a slip of paper, his name and number handwritten on pale gray lines. Business cards were not in the prison's budget. "I'll wait to hear from you," he said. "If it's not you, then it would be helpful to have suggestions. One of the other beneficiaries, perhaps."

I thought of making this proposal to Ethan, or Gabriel, or Delilah. "Perhaps," I said.

"For a start," Bill said, holding the box in his palm, "these are all her possessions at Northwood. I can release them to you today."

The box was light.

"They're of negligible value, I'm afraid," he said. "She had a number of goodwill credits-for exemplary behavior, things like that-but they don't have much value outside."

"That's a shame," I said.

"The only other thing," the warden said, "is the body."

She walked to her desk and pulled out a ring-bound file of plastic wallets, each of them containing a flyer or a catalog. Like a waiter with a menu, she opened it before me, and I glimpsed somber fonts and a few apologetic faces.

"Options," she said, and turned the page. "If you'd like them. Funeral homes. Some of these are a bit more detailed: services, caskets, things like that. And they're all local-all within a fifty-mile radius."

"I'm afraid there's been a misunderstanding," I said.

The warden shut the file, on a leaflet featuring a leopard-print hearse.

"We won't be claiming the body," I said.

"Oh," Bill said.

If the warden was perturbed, she hid it well. "In that case," she said, "we would bury your mother in an unmarked grave, according to default prison policy. Do you have any objections to that?"

"No," I said. "I don't have any objections."

My other meeting was with the chaplain, who had requested to see me. She had asked me to come to the visitors chapel, which was in the car park. One of the warden's assistants accompanied me to a squat outbuilding. Somebody had erected a wooden cross above the door and hung colored tissue paper across the windows. A childÕs stained glass. Six rows of benches faced a makeshift stage, with a fan and a lectern and a model of Jesus, mid-crucifixion.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08H18WHX5
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (February 2, 2021)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 2, 2021
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 4793 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• #146 in Psychological Literary Fiction
• #341 in Women's Psychological Fiction
• #403 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction

About the author

Abigail dean.

Abigail Dean was born in Manchester and grew up in the Peak District. She was formerly a Waterstones bookseller and a lawyer for Google. Her first novel, GIRL A, was a New York Times and Sunday Times top ten bestseller and a Kindle number 1 bestseller. It was chosen as a Best Book of 2021 by the Times, FT, Guardian, Independent, Stylist, and more. The rights to GIRL A sold in 36 territories and a television series is being adapted with Sony. Abigail's second novel, DAY ONE, will be published in March 2024.

Abigail lives in London and is working on her third novel. She has always loved reading, writing, and talking about books. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @AbigailSDean.

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For Caleb Carr, Salvation Arrived on Little Cat’s Feet

As he struggled with writing and illness, the “Alienist” author found comfort in the feline companions he recalls in a new memoir, “My Beloved Monster.”

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MY BELOVED MONSTER: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me, by Caleb Carr

J. Alfred Prufrock measured his life out in coffee spoons . Caleb Carr has done so in cats.

Carr is best known for his 1994 best-selling novel “ The Alienist ,” about the search for a serial killer of boy prostitutes, and his work as a military historian. You have to prod the old brain folds a little more to remember that he is the middle son of Lucien Carr , the Beat Generation figure convicted of manslaughter as a 19-year-old Columbia student after stabbing his infatuated former Boy Scout leader and rolling the body into the Hudson.

This crime is only fleetingly alluded to in “My Beloved Monster,” which tracks Carr’s intimate relationship with a blond Siberian feline he names Masha — but his father haunts the book, as fathers will, more sinisterly than most.

After a short prison term, Lucien went on to become a respectable longtime editor for United Press International. He was a drunk — no surprise there, with famous dissolute-author pals like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg hanging around the house. But that he regularly beat Caleb and threw him down flights of stairs, causing not just psychological but physical injuries that persist into adult life, adds further dark shadings to this particular chapter of literary history.

In a boyhood marred by abuse, neglect and the upheaval of his parents’ divorce, cats were there to comfort and commune with Caleb. Indeed, he long believed he was one in a previous life, “ imperfectly or incompletely reincarnated ” as human, he writes.

Before you summon Shirley MacLaine to convene 2024’s weirdest author panel, consider the new ground “My Beloved Monster” breaks just by existing. Even leaving aside the countless novels about them, dogs have long been thought valid subjects for book-length treatment, from Virginia Woolf’s “ Flush ,” about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, to John Grogan’s “ Marley and Me .” Meow-moirs are thinner on the ground.

It’s taken a younger generation of feminists, and probably the boredom and anxiety of quarantine, to destigmatize (and in some cases monetize ) being owned by a cat. Male cat fanciers, however, have long been stereotyped as epicene or eccentric, though their number has included such national pillars of machismo as Ernest Hemingway and Marlon Brando . When one male lawyer accidentally showed up to a civil forfeiture hearing behind a kitten filter on Zoom in 2021, America went wild with the incongruity.

Carr, though he’s a big one for research, doesn’t waste much time, as I just have, throat-clearing about cats’ perch in the culture. He’s suffered from one painful illness after another — neuropathy, pancreatitis, peritonitis, Covid or something Covid-like, cancer; and endured multiple treatments and surgeries, some “botched” — and his writing has the forthrightness and gravity of someone who wants to maximize his remaining time on Earth.

He capitalizes not only Earth, but the Sun, the Moon and the roles played by various important anonymous humans in his life, which gives his story a sometimes ponderous mythic tone: there’s the Mentor, the Lady Vet (a homage to Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve”; Carr is a classic movie buff), the Spinal Guru and so forth.

Names are reserved for a succession of cats, who have seemingly been as important to Carr as lovers or human friends, if not more so. (At least one ex felt shortchanged by comparison.) Masha is his spirit animal, a feminine counterpart better than any you could find in the old New York Review of Books personals . She eats, he notes admiringly, “like a barbarian queen”; she enjoys the music of Mahler, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff and Wagner (“nothing — and I’ll include catnip in this statement,” he writes, “made her as visibly overjoyed as the Prelude from ‘Das Rheingold’”); she has a really great set of whiskers.

Before Masha there was Suki, blond as well, but a bewitching emerald-eyed shorthair who chomped delicately around rodents’ organs and disappeared one night. Suki was preceded by Echo, a part-Abyssinian with an adorable-sounding penchant for sticking his head in Carr’s shirtfront pocket. Echo was preceded by Chimene, a tabby-splotched white tomcat the adolescent Caleb nurses miraculously through distemper. Chimene was preceded by Ching-ling, whose third litter of kittens suffer a deeply upsetting fate. And before Ching-ling there was Zorro, a white-socked “superlative mouser” who once stole an entire roast chicken from the top of the Carr family’s refrigerator.

To put it mildly, “My Beloved Monster” is no Fancy Feast commercial. All of the cats in it, city and country — Carr has lived in both, though the action is centered at his house on a foothill of Misery Mountain in Rensselaer County, N.Y— are semi-feral creatures themselves at constant risk of gruesome predation. Masha, rescued from a shelter, had also been likely abused, at the very least abandoned in a locked apartment, and Carr is immediately, keenly attuned to her need for wandering free.

This, of course, will put her at risk. The tension between keeping her safe and allowing her to roam, out there with bears, coyotes and fearsome-sounding creatures called fisher weasels, is the central vein of “My Beloved Monster,” and the foreboding is as thick as her triple-layered fur coat. More so when you learn Carr keeps a hunting rifle by one of his easy chairs.

But the book is also about Carr’s devotion to a line of work he likens to “professional gambling.” Despite his best sellers, Hollywood commissions and conscious decision not to have children to stop the “cycle of abuse,” Carr has faced money troubles. The I.R.S. comes to tape a placard to his door and he’s forced to sell vintage guitars to afford Masha’s medications, for she has begun in eerie parallel to develop ailments of her own.

“My Beloved Monster’ is a loving and lovely, lay-it-all-on-the-line explication of one man’s fierce attachment. If you love cats and feel slightly sheepish about it, it’s a sturdy defense weapon. If you hate them, well, there’s no hope for you.

MY BELOVED MONSTER : Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me | By Caleb Carr | Little, Brown | 352 pp. | $32

Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010. More about Alexandra Jacobs

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Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough shine in Hulu’s dark true-crime drama ‘Under the Bridge’

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“Based on a true story” — why do we care? Does it matter whether the events of a dramatic work “really happened,” or sort of happened, more or less in the way we’re being told? Is it a come-on to prurient interests, when the subject is dark or sensational? Is it to appear educational? Is it to advertise that things that seem too incredible to be true really are true, to make what’s shocking even more shocking, or to prop up a story that can’t stand on its own?

If I had a definite answer for you, there wouldn’t have been so many question marks in the preceding paragraph. All of the above, maybe.

“Dragnet” changed the names to protect the innocent, but nowadays it’s the fashion to keep the names, while the facts, found wanting on their own, might get a fictional assist. In “Under the Bridge,” a limited series based on Rebecca Godfrey’s well-received 2005 book about the 1997 murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk in green and watery Victoria, British Columbia, some of the names are the same; others have been changed, as they were on the page, in accordance with Canadian law protecting the identities of young people accused or convicted of a crime; and yet other names have been made up, along with the characters who wear them.

Godfrey’s book falls under the rubric of true crime, if of a particularly literary sort; she was interviewed about it in the Paris Review, and Mary Gaitskill wrote the introduction to its 2019 rerelease. Still, unless you feel it’s imperative that this story of a teenager fatally set upon other teenagers has a basis in reality, it might be best to regard the TV adaptation as fiction clear through — “Lord of the Flies” wasn’t based on anything, after all — something like the fifth season of “ True Detective ,” perhaps, especially given Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone are in starring roles.

Godfrey isn’t a presence in “Under the Bridge,” but, played by Keough, she’s become a major character in the series — a subject nearly, an active participant, a person with her own measure of trauma to address. Developed by Quinn Shephard, whose 2017 film “ Blame ” is also a story of toxic teenhood, the adaptation is true to the facts of the case itself, as reported by Godfrey and others. Much of what surrounds it, however, has been invented or altered for your entertainment — especially as it concerns the investigation, in which the author, returning home to Victoria for the first time in 10 years, becomes an unofficial detective, if one with mixed motives.

She has come, coincidentally, to write a book, on “the misunderstood girls of Victoria,” of which she was once one, when these characters fall into her lap.

Vritika Gupta plays Reena, an outsider desperate to belong, a child awkwardly attempting to imitate an adult, chafing at the strictures of her conservative Jehovah’s Witness parents (Archie Panjabi as Suman and Ezra Faroque Khan as Manjit). To her happy surprise, she finds herself recruited into a tribe of more sophisticated girls — which is to say, they smoke and drink and take drugs. Their leader, Josephine (Chloe Guidry), wears John Gotti’s picture in a locket and controls a legion of “minions” who shoplift on her behalf. (They call themselves the Crip Mafia Cartel, while the police refer to them as “Bic” girls, as in the lighter, “’cause we’re disposable.”) Her lieutenants are Kelly (Izzy G.), Jo’s best friend, and Dusty (Aiyana Goodfellow), who is relatively nice. After a honeymoon period, a series of unfortunate events will lead to the even more unfortunate event that has brought us all here.

Rebecca’s return to town has its own measure of friction. (She doesn’t get along with her mother, either.) Significantly, it brings her back into contact with local police officer Cam (Gladstone), with whom Rebecca and her late brother once were close. (Just how close is hinted at, but never explored.) When Reena’s father and her uncle Raj (Anoop Desai) come to file a missing persons report, Cam is ready at first — along with the rest of the department, including her adoptive father (Matt Craven), the police chief — to write her off as a runaway. But she’ll change her tune and wind up spearheading the investigation, while she wars with Rebecca over her intentions and intrusions and questionable journalistic ethics.

“Perry Smith told Capote things he never told anyone else,” says Rebecca, suggesting she can get the kids to talk.

“So you think you’re writing ‘ In Cold Blood ,’ eh?” implying she isn’t.

Reena’s family background, going back two generations, is explored in a dedicated episode, but there is little context given the other young characters; we get bits of information that lead us to understand they’re products of parental fecklessness, pop cultural influence or brain chemistry without belaboring the point. That’s good, in a way — explicit psychologizing of behavior is a dramatic dead end. But it doesn’t add up to much more than the sorry fact that kids, with their developing brains, can make bad decisions, and compound bad decisions with worse decisions, and take actions that aren’t the product of any decisions at all.

The performances alone make “Under the Bridge” worth watching. Keough, who resembles Godfrey a little, is a world away from Daisy Jones , held together by her literary project, inhabiting the ghost of the bad kid she once was, or pretends to have been, to gain the teenagers’ trust. (She becomes an accomplice, almost.) Gladstone does a lot with a character whose main quality is stolidity; I wish they’d gone a little more into her relationship with Rebecca, but this is a show with a lot on its plate.

And then there are the kids, who are astonishingly good. As Reena, Gupta, heartbreaking in her hopefulness, is especially good. But all the young actors — including Javon Walton as Warren, the odd boy out — are original and human in roles that could easily invite cliche.

Apart from the performances, which alone make the series worth watching, and the overall authenticity of the production, what to make of these eight hours of nearly unrelieved sadness? (The closest the series comes to unalloyed joy, untainted by the knowledge of tragedy to come, is the minute or so in which Rebecca and Cam dance to Siouxsie and the Banshees’ cover of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,” though even that will be alloyed soon enough.)

The conventional crime-solving aspects of the drama drive “Under the Bridge” in the earlier episodes, as does Rebecca’s prodigal’s return plotline. But we wind up mostly with a mess of loss. The characters are too particular on the one hand, and the mean girls trope too familiar on the other, to usefully generalize into a statement about the plight of teenage girls. Though there are many well-written scenes — the performances would not be so impressive if there weren’t — over eight episodes, the series, with its shifting attention and skips back and forth in time, loses emotional force; it sustains one’s interest, certainly, but less so one’s sympathies.

A little light does break in at the end. Justice is served, as the series switches briefly into a courtroom drama — though Rebecca has her doubts about whether it’s truly being served. There’s a late-series development that indicates a different future for Cam (with a quickly passing nod to Canada’s institutional racist history). Rebecca will go on to write her book — she has a contract for it before the series ends — and, sometime after the series ends, sell it to the screen. (A closing title card notes that Godfrey was involved in the series’ development before her death in 2022 .)

And here we are.

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What does Liz Truss’s book tell us about her American ambitions?

The former prime minister spent just 49 days in office but wants to stay on the world stage. Her attacks on Biden and praise for Trump are aimed at the populist right

In her new book , the former British prime minister Liz Truss directs scathing attacks and mockery at Joe Biden, president of her country’s closest ally. Biden was guilty of “utter hypocrisy and ignorance”, Truss writes, when the US leader said he “disagree[d] with the policy” of “cutting taxes on the super wealthy” in the mini-budget Truss introduced in September 2022, shortly after taking power.

“I was shocked and astounded that Biden would breach protocol by commenting on UK domestic policy,” Truss adds. “We had been the United States’ staunchest allies through thick and thin.”

Such harsh words between British and American leaders, in or out of office, would normally seem unusual. But Truss has scores to settle. By the time Biden spoke, in an ice-cream parlor in Portland, Oregon , Truss’s mini-budget had already caused panic over British pension funds, threatened to crash the UK economy and been withdrawn – a humiliating reversal for any prime minister, let alone one little more than a month into the job. Six days later, Truss was forced to resign.

A year and a half later, offering the public her version of what went so terribly wrong, Truss still manages to thunder: “What the Biden administration, and the [European Union], and their international allies didn’t want was a country demonstrating that things can be done differently, undercutting them in the process.”

Perhaps. Either way, Biden is still president while Truss is now a mere backbench MP for a constituency in rural Norfolk. But the release of her book, Ten Years to Save the West, alongside her founding of Popular Conservatism , a new pressure group, says a lot about where she sees her future.

Far from taking her allowance and pursuing traditional, relatively sedate pursuits – lobbying , say, or trying to achieve peace in the Middle East – Truss wants to remain relevant on the global populist right, particularly in the US.

Truss’s book is published in the US and UK on Tuesday. The American jacket carries praise from two hard-right senators, Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, both vocal enemies of Biden. It also carries a different subtitle from the British edition. In the UK, Truss is said to offer “Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room”. In the US, she is “Leading the Revolution Against Globalism, Socialism, and the Liberal Establishment”.

It’s a lot to pack in between the school run – Truss has two daughters – and her duties as a Norfolk MP. But it all points to a clear ambition to carve out a presence in rightwing US media, long on plain display.

In February, Truss attended the CPAC conference in Maryland, giving an address to an audience of what Politico called “bewildered conservatives” before appearing with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former campaign chair and White House adviser, a leading far-right voice who pitched Truss into controversy with remarks about the jailed far-right figure Tommy Robinson.

Truss will soon be back, visiting Washington to promote her book at the Heritage Foundation, the thinktank behind Project 2025, a vast and controversial plan for a second Trump administration.

Truss’s relationship with Heritage is well established. She spoke there in 2015, as trade secretary and over the objections of the British ambassador, and accepted an award named after Margaret Thatcher there last year. Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage, also blurbs the US edition of Truss’s book.

The foundation is a couple of miles from the White House, but Truss is hardly likely to seek contact with Biden or his administration. That may be just as well. Elsewhere in her book, she describes meeting the president at the White House in September 2021 , when she was foreign secretary under Boris Johnson.

“Our Oval Office meeting lasted around an hour and a half,” Truss writes, adding that this was not a sign of favor.

“The truth was it owed more to Biden’s penchant for telling extended anecdotes in response to any issue that came up. ‘Ah, that reminds me …’ he would say, as his officials looked at each other with knowing smiles. Ten minutes later, the story would end and he would move on to something else.”

Biden’s age, 81, and mental capacity to be president are the source of constant media speculation and political attack – and strong White House pushback. But Truss has more to say. At the Cop 26 climate conference in Glasgow, later in 2021, she “bumped into Joe Biden again. He remembered our meeting at the White House, telling me he’d never forget ‘those blue eyes’, even though we’d both been wearing Covid masks.”

It is not clear if the reader should think Biden or Truss was under the impression mouth coverings also obscure the eyes.

Truss is still not done. She includes the president with the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi among US politicians deemed “unhelpful” over Northern Ireland issues, their interventions “generally on one side of the argument, doubtless egged on by the Irish embassy in Washington”.

She also describes how in September 2022, as prime minister, she attended the UN general assembly in New York. There, she says, “Biden regaled me with tales of the Democrat campaign trail, including an incident in which he had fallen over. He said, ‘I can see them thinking, ‘You can’t get up, grandpa’, but I got up.’

“I formed the view that he was running again in 2024,” Truss writes, before risking a self-own by writing about a faux pas at the same event, when she called out “Hi, Dr Biden!” to “a blonde lady” who turned out to be Brigitte Macron, the wife of the president of France.

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“I hope she didn’t hear!” Truss writes.

The vignette about Biden at the UN is not the only one in Ten Years to Save the West in which Truss uses “Democrat” to refer to the Democratic party. It is a telling choice. Republicans have long used the incorrect term as a term of political abuse. Nor is it the only instance in which Truss – or her US editors – must adapt or explain her language.

When writing about UK politics, as in most of the book, Truss must often offer translations or explanations for US readers. For one small but telling example, in referring to her distaste for National Insurance – a payroll tax that supports state pensions and unemployment and incapacity benefits – she calls it “a social security entitlement”. On the US right, “entitlement” is almost as dirty a word as “Democrat”.

At least until the eve of publication day, Truss had shied from saying Donald Trump’s name but said she wanted a Republican in the White House in 2025. She says so in her book but abandons any pretense of subtlety when it comes to praising Trump, now the presumptive GOP nominee despite facing 88 criminal charges and multimillion-dollar penalties for tax fraud and defamation, the latter arising from a rape allegation a judge called “ substantially true ”.

Calling herself “an early fan of the TV show The Apprentice” who “enjoyed the Donald’s catchphrases and sassy business advice”, Truss says that when Trump entered politics in 2015, colleagues in parliament and “elderly ladies” in Swaffham, a town in her constituency, were united in “seem[ing] genuinely animated by the disruptive Republican candidate”. She makes a common link between support for Trump and support for Brexit – which she campaigned against before becoming its hardline champion on her way to leading her country.

When Trump was president, Truss writes, she “chased” Boris Johnson “down a fire escape” in New York, to demand inclusion in a meeting between the British and American leaders. According to Truss, who was then trade secretary, that meeting saw Trump urge her and his own trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, to get on with talks for a UK-US trade deal – only for Johnson to try to make Trump focus on restoring the Iran nuclear agreement, a tactic that did not work.

Truss never got her trade deal. In part, she blames “many in Number 10” Downing Street who “seemed to want to hold Trump at arm’s length for political reasons”.

“The UK media provided universally negative coverage of Trump, and leftists in the Conservative party were keen to insult him at every opportunity,” Truss writes. “My view was that he was the leader of the free world and an important ally.”

That view stands in stark comparison to her abuse of Biden, who beat Trump conclusively in an election Trump still refuses to concede. Furthermore, when it comes to the deadly fruits of that refusal – the attack on Congress Trump incited – Truss keeps her observations to a single paragraph.

On 6 January 2021, Truss writes, she was “on a phone call with Bob Lighthizer”, “working on” removing a US tariff on Scottish whisky. From the Executive Office building, next to the White House, Lighthizer “remarked … in passing that the street was full of people with huge American flags walking towards Congress. Little did I realise how seismic that event would turn out to be.”

Truss eventually saw the whisky tariff removed – in summer 2021, after “talks with the new Democrat administration”.

“But with Joe Biden as president,” Truss writes, “it was made quite clear that a trade deal with the United Kingdom was no longer a priority. We had missed the boat.”

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