Book Review: Stolen, Lucy Christopher

Reading Level:          Young Adult 

Hardcover:                 299 Pages 

Publisher:                  Chicken House, Scholastic May 1, 2010

Parasols:                   4

Gemma Toombs is in a Bangkok coffee shop when she see's someone familiar.  He calls her over and from there entwines her into his web.  From there she is Stolen.  When Gemma wakes up from her captor's drugs, she realizes that she is in the middle of nowhere.  The middle of the Australian outback.  Ty wants her to love him and make a life with him there, but Gem is too provincial for that.  She needs traffic, buildings, air conditioning and a proper bathroom.

This was an extremely difficult story to read.  Just the idea of being held in the middle of nowhere is something that seems worse than perhaps being buried alive.  Although you feel for Ty and you wonder why he went to the depths of taking Gemma.  You start to wonder if he really did it for her own good.

This book made me extremely thirsty.  The author talks about the sand and the heat and the bugs and snakes, everything that would be in my worst nightmare.  This is a brilliantly written story and one that will linger in your thoughts long after you finish it.  Was Gem feeling that Stockholm Syndrome because she could only rely on Ty and she became to like him perhaps even love him.  But was that Gemma's doing or was it just her basic survival instinct she felt she had to love him to survive.  These are questions that perhaps will never be answered.  One thing I really liked about this story was the way it was told.  Gemma is writing down everything in letter form to her Ty.  Telling him how she feels and why she did what she did to survive.  An excellent read if a just a bit of a downer.