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Abigail Dean took pretty clear inspiration from their story for this book, and it’s a truly tragic tale in its own right.
Being the oldest sibling she felt responsible for these children’s well-being, but what can you possibly to to help save them from the wrath of a father, the disillusion of her mother, while chained to a bed and wasting away? It’s a poignant parental crisis, though as a dramatic conflict, it doesn’t quite power “Girl” through a wandering second half in which characters’ incremental shifts in regard and outlook stand in for major incident. Dean was on a work trip for Google in India, in a taxi in a rural area with no reception, when her agent started trying to get in touch to tell her the news.
It’s five years since Theresa May, then the United Kingdom’s first prime minister of the Brexit era, coined the term “citizen of nowhere” to denigrate residents of the country who identified themselves more globally. In collaboration with DP Tasha Back, Onashile casts it, literally, in a quite different light, seeking out brilliant jewel tones in its nighttime street life and the lurid oases of color — a shiny pink puffer jacket, a small ocean of eye-shadow, loud tangles of graffiti — that its residents create amid its more squalid corners. And when the twist did come it made me realize that when we construct narratives of happily ever after for well publicized abuse victims (or any abuse victims) we do it out of a desire for happily ever after. The gradual, pained steps they make toward social integration — in the process severing some apron strings knotted suffocatingly tight by trauma — mark the subtle curve of the drama in this accomplished but unshowy debut feature from Onashile, a British-Nigerian playwright here lightly expanding on themes raised in her auspicious 2020 short “Expensive Shit. The protagonist, Lex, is known as Girl A, one of several siblings who were starved and chained up by their parents, who used Christianity to justify the cruelty.
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. But Kieran hasn’t come home for years – a choice he made as a teenager had devastating consequences, ones that still echo through his family’s life and the lives of the town’s inhabitants. Alexandria Gracie has escaped her parents, who have been shot dead after keeping Lex and her siblings in abusive captivity. My heart melted for these poor kids and their horrible parents made me want to shred the pages of this book in anger! Lex meets each of her siblings as she prepares the final fate of The House with flashback to their time in captivity.As a child, Dean wrote all the time, getting into fan fiction as a teenager (Final Fantasy stuff, she admits – she was a big gamer at the time). 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.
This is a juicy j read for those who were fascinated/horrified/curious about the Turpin case that left us all wondering: "WHY! They meet (most of them) again at the end to discuss some financial matters regarding their childhood home.Determined to turn their old house into something positive, a Community Center, Lex must reach out to each of her surviving siblings.
Some lacksadaisical googling revealed that local authorities mostly DON’T check up on home-schooled children in the UK – that was a surprise. I didn’t connect with Lex on any level; I just couldn’t warm to her, and even found it hard to have any degree of sympathy. Alice and her partner Joe pick up sticks and move from London to Penton, a bucolic (and fictional) Cotswold “market town.There is nothing casual about what happens here, and the victims are the heroes, in the most difficult, compromised ways imaginable.
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