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.
I had such high hopes for this book, it got great reviews online and all of my favorite people said it was really worth reading...in my opinion it wasn't.
This book, like the summary states, is a giant letter to a kidnapper. This is probably the longest letter I have ever read (300 pages!) and like most letters it wasn't very engaging if you're not privy to the plot at all. It was completely awkward reading this VERY personal letter as an outsider, I felt like I should be listening for Gemma to burst into the room and take the book from my hands like a teenage girl defending her private diary.
Gemma gets abducted from an airport and slowly falls in love with 'you'. That was the most annoying part of this book. It's a letter, so obviously she is talking to Ty, who will be the recipient of this letter so using 'you' is totally appropriate...but it also became a huge pain in the butt. I was instantly associated with the kidnapper and it just felt wrong. It was like she spent this entire book trying to convince me I kidnapped her and in some twisted way I was Ty. It just didn't work for me.
I'm not a big fan of books written in the first person to begin with and this took first person to a whole new level. Gemma described everything in excruciating detail, which some people totally love, but I need more plot than set up and this book/letter just didn't deliver. Each page I was hoping to get more into Ty's reasoning for kidnapping Gemma in the first place but it took about 100 pages to even skim the surface. I was bored for 90% of this book and the other 10% was only vaguely interesting--not enough to fully engage me at any time. I was reading this book in between studying for exams and after my allotted break time was up I was actually excited to get back to studying. That's how disconnected I was from the story.
Gemma was a decent main character, I could almost identify with her...sometimes. Because everything was from her and only her own point of view I didn't get much in the way of what happened when she was ACTUALLY kidnapped. It was more like, "...and then you started to touch my hand, it was soft but yet firm. I felt something come over me, it must have been drugs. You carried me away from the table and took me to a back room somewhere...", now imagine that for another 300 pages and that's Stolen in a nutshell.
I'm mostly upset because I haven't heard a single bad review about this book, but I was severely disappointed with the ending. I won't say what happened, but after everything that went down the author just gave up and wrote the classic, cookie-cutter ending.
This book had so much potential but it all went down the drain. Books are written in book form for a reason and now I realize why. This entire letter was a flashback, not a progressing story line. I didn't understand Ty's character at all--it was like he just happened to be there in between Gemma blabbering about the red Australian desert. (up until today I believed there were only a few ways to describe the color red...I was wrong)
Overall this book/letter/flashback get 2 stars. It was an interesting concept, but it failed in execution.
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