Meh. I liked it well enough to finish it. I kept waiting for the “oh wow" moment, the twist that would make things worthwhile and it never came. There were a couple of small surprises, but nothing worth over 300 pages of slogging through sibling politics.
Lex Gracie, along with her siblings, is a survivor. After failing at setting up his own church, Lex's father goes off the deep end into religion and anti-government conspiracy theories. It starts mildly enough, with home schooling the children and progresses to severely restricting their food intake, tying them to their beds, and eventually chaining them there. We meet Lex many years later when she is a lawyer, just after her biological mother has died in prison. She is her mother's executor and must deal with their childhood home, known in the press as the House of Horrors.
As part of the executor position, Lex must get in touch with each of her siblings and get their agreement on her plans for the house. Each chapter deals with a particular sibling, past and present. So, lots of sibling relationship angst, multiplied by several factors by the abusive situation. The author represents this reasonably accurately, I imagine, maybe even toning down the resentments and warped ties between them. They all have issues and getting everyone on the same page is like herding cats (although I thought they were actually far too easily convinced to be co-operative).
I you like reading biographies and memoirs of abuse survivors, you will probably get more out of this novel than I did. I've read a few of these, enough to know it's not my genre. I'd hoped for a little more from fiction, where the author can arrange things their own way to illustrate their point.
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