Stolen

Stolen
By Lucy Christopher
Chicken House, 2010. 299 pgs. Young Adult

Sixteen-year-old Gemma is traveling from London to Vietnam with her parents. On a layover in Bangkok, she is drugged and abducted. When she finally begins to regain her senses, she finds she's trapped in the middle of the Australian desert with her kidnapper, Ty, who has been watching her since she was a child and has decided to keep her "forever". After her escape attempts fail, Gemma starts to settle into a routine and finds that maybe Ty's intentions aren't as bad as she originally thought.

This book keeps the reader tense, waiting to see what's going to happen next. There's an expectation that Ty is going to hurt Gemma in some way, to show that he's a monster. Even as the author tries to paint him in a sympathetic light, and as Gemma comes to understand him better, it was difficult for me to see him as anything more than a lunatic--maybe a nice lunatic and one who has had a difficult past but still a lunatic nonetheless--which made it hard for me to believe Gemma's conflicting feelings about him. I also didn't feel like I ever get a really good sense of who Gemma was; she wasn't a dynamic character for me. Still, this edgy first novel provides lots of food for thought and interesting discussion topics.

AE