Book Review: Stolen
Stolen: A Letter to my Captor, by Lucy Christopher
16-year-old Gemma Toombs lives in England with her less-than-caring parents till she is kidnapped at the Bangkok Airport by Tyler McFarlane, who takes her to the middle of the Great Sandy Desert in Australia. The book is written in second person narrative in the form of letters which she writes after she is rescued.
“How long will you keep me?" I asked. You shrugged. "Forever, of course.”
This book was beautiful.
Well-paced, with a great plot and some really moving scenes, this book deserves at least a four- star rating, and that's only because I compare it with my all-time favourites, The Book Thief and The Scorpio Races.
I was a little annoyed with how easily Gemma lets herself get kidnapped and drugged, because she gets immediately enamored of this charming, gorgeous stranger in the airport, and allows him to buy her a coffee, which he conveniently spikes. (*gasp! You can't even trust random strangers these days!*) But then you go through the book and realize she isn't the sharpest crayon in the dabba, now:
*sets off robustly into a vast sandy desert in a brave attempt to escape her benevolent captor completely confident of own navigation skills *
*manages to get captor's old rusty car stuck in the sand*
*decides she can traverse this tiny, bijou expanse easily on foot*
*strips her garments one by one to escape the scorching heat*
*almost dies from severe sunburns and dehydration*
.
.
...Yeah.
In her defense, she had no other way of getting away from him, and she had to try (aside from the fact that she could have avoided this whole scenario if she hadn't been so naive in the first place).
The story progresses quite well after she's been whisked away, though. I still kept waiting for something to happen even after she has been brought to Australia, but then realized that this game had been played well:
It was because it moved slowly in the beginning that it feels like the departure was so sudden, rushed. Brilliant move.
*slow approving clap*
“I hate it, all of this," I screamed, my voice breaking. "I even hate him, even him." A huge sob came up from my chest. And I did, right then. I hated you for everything; for making me feel so helpless everywhere I went, for making me lose control. I hated you for all the emotions in my head, for the confusion... for the way I was suddenly doubting everything. I hated you for turning my life upside down and then smashing it into shards. I hated you for making me stand with a whirring fan in my hand, screaming at my mum. But I hated you for something else, too. Right then, and at every moment since you'd left me, all I could think about was you. I wanted you in that apartment. I wanted your arms around me, your face close to mine. I wanted your smell. And I knew I couldn't-shouldn't-have it. That's what I hated most. The uncertainty of you. You'd kidnapped me, put my life in danger... but I loved you, too. Or thought I did. None of it made sense.”
Gemma takes a while to be able to trust Ty (which is funny considering she was all swoony in the airport) and to get used to all the yucky black stuff in the water. But once she realizes he's not going to harm her (most probably) and adjusts to the environment, she even participates in some of the daily activities he performs.
This slow change is worth admiring because the way it's written makes it seem seamless and... not unnatural. You grow with Gemma.
fun activities in the middle of an endless desert:
a collection of favorite pastimes
1. Go camel hunting
2. Build a chicken- wire fence
3. Go snake collecting
4. Paint your outhouse
5. Gaze at boulders
6. Gaze at sand
7. Collect food supplies (oh, wait. that's essential for your survival.)
Thing is, it's easy to write a witty, sarcastic review. It's much harder to explain the parts that hit you hard in the heart.
“It was like I existed in a kind of parallel universe, thinking thoughts and feelings that no one else understood.”
I really, really liked the whole idea of Ty painting the desert in his outhouse, with all the patterns and textures and the myriad details of the great, sacred landscape all around him. And painting himself to be all part of that painting-- the sunlight floods into the room in the evening and the colors are all around Gemma and Tyler; just in the way the desert is all around them-- so metaphoric, and moving.
That night, they lie outside, right under the vast starry sky. He has agreed to let her go if she doesn't fall in love with the landscape in three months. He genuinely wants her to be happy with him.
You know the craziest part? This book messes with your head in a veeeery sneaky way: it's obviously creepy and unsettling when you learn how Tyler has been following Gem around for ten years, watching her from the periphery-- but you fall for him eventually, too. How can you not? Look at how much he loves the desert, this ancient land; he is so earnest, and so...genuine. You begin to sympathize with him.
“And its hard to hate someone once you understand them”
And then it all happens very quickly: Ty has gone out when she wakes in the morning, she goes looking for him, she gets bitten by a snake he's trying to catch for preparing an antivenom, and her condition's bad. He drives her to a mining site (ah, so he's lied about there being no civilization here whatsoever) and they are about to fly her to a hospital and she reaches out, unwilling to let him go.
And he goes along with her.
Knowing he would be arrested.
It ends so suddenly! She is free, she is home! Just when we thought she could, after all, make a life there...
The beauty of this book is in the snatches of emotion we glimpse, and the vividness of the landscape; it has a life of its own, its is perhaps the most pivotal character in this book.
When she gets bitten and he puts her on a makeshift stretcher to take her to the car, it starts raining. The desert comes alive, running rivers of red. He lets the camel go. He sets it free so he can save Gemma.
...Ty wasn't a bad person, he didn't realize what he had done.
But in kidnapping Gemma, stealing her away, he opened her eyes to a whole new different world, which she came to respect, love and in the end, lose.
“You know, maybe if we'd met as ordinary people, one day, maybe ... maybe things might have been different. Maybe I could have loved you.”
I really, really liked this book.
