Stolen by Lucy Christopher

260 × 400 - lucychristopher.com

    Today I am going to be talking about Stolen by Lucy Christopher. This is the story of a kidnapped girl, creatively written as the victim, Gemma, to her kidnapper, Ty. After a fight with her parents, Gemma leaves them in the airport waiting area and heads to get coffee. When she needs more money to pay for it and man named Ty covers for her. Gemma thinks he looks familiar but cannot figure out where they have met. They sit together; they talk; he drugs her coffee. The next thing she knows is that she is lying in a bed in a dirty house in Australia, oceans away from her family in England. The house is in the middle of a desert, not even on the map, without any way to communicate and hundreds of miles of barren land between her and civilization. She needs to find away to get back to her old life, where she was happy...but does she want to?

    I would rate this book a 6 out of 10. It is boring and slow at some parts, during which I basically skimmed and barely missed anything, but the rest was quite interesting. The writing is unique because I actually felt bad for the captor Ty most of the story instead of Gemma. He grew up without his mother in a foster care system when he gets a letter from his mother saying she lived in England and wanted him to come see her. He flies to the house, which is down the street from where Gemma lives, to find it full of drugs and alcohol but not his mother. He doesn't have enough money to go back so he stays and works. He, at age nineteen, meets ten year old Gemma in a park and from then on watches her from afar. Eventually he begins to love this girl. Also as Gemma stays with Ty longer and longer she starts to love him too, to understand him. Since the book is written from her perspective, Christopher left it up to reader to decide if Ty was good or evil and if Gemma was blinded to the real madness when she got so much attention. The very ending also leaves the reader wondering...

    This book would be perfect for any young adult reader and I highly recommend it!

    Comment with your thoughts on Stolen.