Is it possible to go on loving someone who has ruined your life? As emotionally wrenching questions go, that one is particularly fraught. But Caitlin Shaugnessy, a journalist with the Toronto Star, has a valid reason for considering it. Caitlin’s longtime romantic partner, the psychoanalyst Jerry Simpson, has been murdered. Jerry’s killer is his traumatized, possibly autistic teenage ward Inez, whom he rescued from horrific circumstances in her native Guatemala. After four months living with Jerry, Inez commits her horrific crime, in the process dooming herself to spend the rest of her life locked up in a mental institution in Labrador. Caitlin, meanwhile, is left to comprehend both the fault lines in her relationship with Jerry and the complex motives of the young woman who busted them open.

Jerry is an unlikely saviour. In Guatemala to procure psychotropic medications for use in his practice, he has a chance meeting with Inez’s parents, who are desperate to be rid of the child they have branded “evil.” Inez, the book’s eponymous girl in the box, is a complicated character forged out of longtime neglect and abuse at the hands of others, be it family members or the soldiers waging war in her home country. She’s spent years in captivity, both literal and otherwise, and is so tiny that most people don’t even realize she has passed puberty. And she remains mute, except for an uncanny ability to mimic the voices of other people. 

Readers are meant to identify with Inez’s struggle to uncover her true voice and move beyond mere mimicry and repetition, and, by extension, to come to terms with the terrible events of her childhood. Dalton sets up a pivotal moment in which Inez declares, in her native language and her own voice, “I am.” But before this scene unfolds, she appears only as a cipher, more a magical construct than a living, breathing human. Part of that is by design: Inez serves as the repository of Jerry’s saviour complex and, later, Caitlin’s survivor guilt. This is fine, to a point, but a story built out of psychological excavation is supposed to be both transcendent and cathartic, and though Dalton dances around these emotional states, she can’t quite capture either.

The manner in which Inez comes between Caitlin and Jerry also seems curiously bloodless. Partly, this results from Dalton’s choice to show the entire arc of the couple’s relationship, starting 12 years earlier, when they were brash young adults travelling around Guatemala. At first, Caitlin thinks Jerry is a prick; Jerry, however, is happy to encounter her fighting spirit and slowly convinces her they should be together. But their reasons for maintaining separate residences are kept opaque. Caitlin reminisces that they talked many times of moving in, even circling real estate ads, but never pulled the trigger.

Again, this opacity is the consequence of a conscious decision on Dalton’s part:  she clearly wants to fashion Caitlin as another girl in a box. Throughout the book, Caitlin shies away from painful truths about her relationship with Jerry – and his own relationship with Inez. Caitlin’s best friend repeatedly excoriates her for not facing up to what might have transpired between Jerry and Inez, but when Caitlin finally does attempt to reach out to Inez, the professionals charged with the teen’s care question her motives: “Can you be sure your fondness for this truth is not more a product of curiosity than compassion? Some of us are driven by such a passion to know that we forget to ask whom we might hurt in the process of finding out.”

Dalton, the author of several non-fiction works and books for children, eschews a traditional mystery plot in favour of a psychological portrait of her three main characters at various stages in their lives. She has the requisite compassion, but her empathy gets in the way of creating believable human beings, which is a problem for a book that depends so strongly on a reader’s recognition of the characters’ complexities.

Dalton also has a fondness for detail, especially with respect to her descriptions of the wilds of Guatemala or the intricacies of psychoanalytic theory, but errant information throws the reader off. For example, a book set in 1983 should not include any mention of DNA testing, let alone several, since Sir Alec Jeffreys didn’t report on his discovery of DNA profiling for forensic science purposes until the following year.

While one can admire The Girl in the Box for its obvious ambition, the execution falls short. One can’t help but wonder if Dalton is aware of this shortcoming, and drops in a twist late in the book as a means of compensating. The whole point of the novel is supposed to be that final resolutions don’t matter; understanding the nuances of people and their motivations is more important. But the reliance on a late-game revelation that undercuts the subtle complexities of her characters and their motives seems to indicate a discomfort with the way her story has unfolded, when what is needed is absolute confidence.