Book Review: Stolen

This was another book club pick, this time for my young adult book club. Stolen, by Lucy Christopher, tells the story of Gemma Toombs, a sixteen year old girl who is abducted from the Bangkok airport and spirited away to a desert location in Australia. Her captor, Ty, a man nine years her senior, is a drifter who has followed her for six years and orchestrated the abduction with expert precision. Gemma writes the tale as if addressed to Ty, giving her perspective of the events as they play out.

It received many glowing reviews on Amazon. But, I just can't quite get there. Even though it held my interest for the most part, there were many parts that dragged along (lots of desert descriptions and endless, but fruitless, ruminating on how to escape or inflict harm on her captor). Still, I had no problem keeping with the story line. I was a bit worried at the outset that it would involve rape or some difficult sexual story line. I was thankful that the story never really drifted into that territory. There wasn't a lot of foul language either. I think the greatest difficulty for me was in buying into the Stockholm Syndrome. And that whole idea that the girl had a really crappy life and her captor was actually doing her a favor? Well, I couldn't exactly buy that either. And at the end of the novel, I just found myself thinking "I could have read it or not and it wouldn't have really mattered to me." Sadly, not one I feel like recommending to others. Then again, as I said before, I'm knee-deep in Divergent, so it may have merely suffered by comparison.