Stolen by Lucy Christopher

You saw me before I saw you.

You stole me.

While waiting in the airport at Bangkok with her parents to board a flight to Vietnam, 16 year old Gemma Toombs meets Ty. He seems strangely familiar, though Gemma can’t quite place where she might have seen him. After he buys her a coffee, Gemma begins to feel strange and soon she finds herself in a drugged haze. When she wakes days later, Gemma is alone with Ty, in a wooden house in the middle of a desert.


“How long will you keep me?” I asked.

“Forever,” you said.

Gemma tries to escape but soon realizes that she has no way out. Surrounded by miles of burning, red desert, and totally dependent upon Ty, she continues to resist his attempts to win her confidence and her love. As the days pass, Gemma learns about her captor’s past and his intentions for the future. She learns just how much planning went into her capture. Throughout most of her ordeal she continues to resist until finally Ty strikes a bargain with Gemma. But just as she’s beginning to see Ty differently, fate intervenes.
Discussion

Stolen is a remarkable book written as a letter from a victim to her captor. Through most of the book, Gemma struggles to understand her captor and his motives. Her character is realistically drawn – she’s not perfect and has her typical issues with her parents and peers. Ty, although creepy is not sinister. He seems more like a misguided soul, struggling to find a place for himself.

Lucy Christopher manages to hold the reader’s attention throughout with a series of events that create suspense and leave the reader wondering how the situation will be resolved. Will Gemma eventually escape, will she grow to love Ty or will something sinister happen?

The book also offers the reader a chance to explore Stockholm syndrome – the paradoxical condition where victims of intense emotional trauma see their perpetrators in a positive way. This part of the book was probably the most interesting to me.

I highly recommend this book. Stolen offers a unique storyline among a series of books that have recently touched on a similar theme and it has a more positive ending than Living Dead Girl.


Book Details:


Stolen by Lucy Christopher
Chicken House Ltd.  2009
304 pp.