Stolen by Lucy Christopher

Stolen: A Letter To My Captor
Sixteen year old Gemma is kidnapped from Bangkok airport and taken to the Australian Outback. This wild and desolate landscape becomes almost a character in the book, so vividly is it described. Ty, her captor, is no stereotype. He is young, fit and completely gorgeous. This new life in the wilderness has been years in the planning. He loves only her, wants only her. Under the hot glare of the Australian sun, cut off from the world outside, can the force of his love make Gemma love him back? The story takes the form of a letter, written by Gemma to Ty, reflecting on those strange and disturbing months in the outback. Months when the lines between love and obsession, and love and dependency, blur until they don't exist - almost.






The story and writing by Lucy Christopher was absolutely incredible, but I'm still not sure how I feel about the end of Stolen and the lack of a true conclusion. The structure of the book is one long letter written by Gemma to Ty, the man who kidnapped her from a Bangkok airport and brought her to his home in the Australian Outback. The book is haunting, and the characters remain in your subconscious long after you put the book down. My emotions throughout this book scaled each end of the spectrum as Gemma tells the disturbing story in her own words--exactly what happened in that desert. Although I felt that nothing much happened in the day-to-day telling of the story, I was so wrapped up in the emotional journey that I found it hard to tear myself away and put the book down. Gemma discovers that Ty has been a shadow in her life for longer than she is willing to believe, but with her forced captivity, she gets to know him and although she knows what he did was wrong, even with everyone pushing her to say and think otherwise, she's unwilling to believe that he is a terrible person deep down inside. He proves this with his actions towards the end of the book. In the end, I do not truly know if Gemma suffered from Stockholm syndrome, her true feelings toward Ty were rational in the sense that she both hated him and loved a part of him that opened her eyes to a different world.