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Kim

Peace. Love. Books.

Stolen: A Letter to My Captor - Lucy Christopher The 3-star rating here on Goodreads says that I "liked it" but I've been meaning to give it a 2.5. I found it more than "ok" but I also didn't quite like it. There were just parts that I thought were written very well.

There's not much to the plot. Gemma is kidnapped by this man called Ty and is taken to the middle of nowhere in the deserts of Australia. For the most part, Gemma loathes her kidnapper. At 16, she is really just a child and that made me feel more sick about the whole abduction, even though Ty "treats her well."

So let me list what I didn't like about this book:
1. The use of Stockholm Syndrome was ineffective, in my opinion. Believability is an important criteria for me to like a book. Even when I read something non-contemporary like fantasy, science fiction and paranormal, the feelings evoked from situations must be real. In the case of this book, I didn't buy it when Gemma developed feelings for her captor. She was gone for, what, a month when the situation changed and he had to turn her in. Up until the night before that, Gemma HATED Ty. She was scared and angry. And he didn't reveal enough of himself for her to even develop sympathy for him. I don't know. Maybe it's just me.

2. The writing style. I'm not a fan of reading from the first person POV but since the whole book was intended to be written as a letter, I understood why it was done like that. However, it still took me some time to get used to it.

3. The book failed to make me feel. I wasn't emotionally affected until maybe the last quarter of the book. In fact, all the stars in my rating is because of the last 10 pages of this book. I cried, yes I did, because it was only then when I felt the honesty of Gemma's feelings.


I guess the only redeeming factor of this book is the ending. I was hoping for the story to go further in order to get a glimpse of Ty and understand him better. But the book wasn't intended to be that way and I guess that's why I never bought the Stockholm Syndrome in this case. We just have to be content with the theory that Ty was nothing more than a man with a serious mental illness.