Stolen (Stolen, #1) in Aussie Readers

Aug 23, 2010 Bree T rated it liked it

Shelves: library-reads, young-adult, contemporary, alternative-history

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Gemma is 16 and at Bangkok airport getting herself a coffee when she is befriended by a good-looking young man. His accent is hard to define but he offers to pay for her coffee when she has the incorrect currency and makes shy conversation with her. It isn’t long before Gemma doesn’t start to feel very well – her head is fuzzy, she can barely walk and she’s slurring her words. The young man steers her carefully away from people and redresses her, then she’s on a plane. And it’s not the one that Gemma is 16 and at Bangkok airport getting herself a coffee when she is befriended by a good-looking young man. His accent is hard to define but he offers to pay for her coffee when she has the incorrect currency and makes shy conversation with her. It isn’t long before Gemma doesn’t start to feel very well – her head is fuzzy, she can barely walk and she’s slurring her words. The young man steers her carefully away from people and redresses her, then she’s on a plane. And it’s not the one that she should be on, with her parents.

Several days later after being drugged and taken to their destination in the boot (trunk) of a car, Gemma awakes in a log cabin in literally, the middle of no where. She’s in the Australian outback and there’s nothing but red dust and sand dunes for miles and miles. Her captor, named Ty, claims that if she just gives it a chance, she will learn to love where she is. She will learn to love this harsh land because as he puts it, it needs to be loved.

Ty has obviously been planning this for some time – he built the wooden cabin himself from scratch, well located near a desert oasis from which he pipes water into the cabin. He has enough in the way of supplies to last a very, very long time and there’s no need to make the very long trek to the nearest town – a town that might be days away for all Gemma knows. She’s from London and her knowledge of the Australian outback isn’t exactly substantial. She knows that it’s hot, dry, dusty and depressing and she wants to get the hell out. However she can’t and her one desperate escape attempt proves to her that she needs Ty. She can’t survive out there alone, she just doesn’t have the knowledge or the skill to do so. The only way she’s ever leaving this cabin is if he chooses to take her.

This review is going to contain ***SPOILERS***

There were parts of this novel that I thought were excellently done – for example, Gemma’s reaction to being kidnapped. I found her hysteria, her abuse of Ty, her attempt at bargaining with him and her desperate attempt at flight all very believable and real. I thought that the isolation Gemma felt, her utter hopelessness at her situation and the bleakness of the landscape, was done perfectly. I live in Australia and I couldn’t imagine being held in the outback like that. I’m well aware what it’s like out there in the centre, the monotonous landscape, the heat, the dusty dryness, the huge sand dunes. For a girl coming from London, it would’ve been incomprehensible. Even the up and down relationship between Gemma and Ty I thought was excellent. Gemma went through a myriad of emotions towards him and the character of Ty himself seemed more complex and layered than just a thug who had kidnapped a pretty girl, or a predator. He never laid a finger on Gemma, but he did constantly hope that she could come to care for him of her own volition. He was obviously a very lonely and disturbed person but this was written almost sympathetically so that you (or I) never quite hated him although I came close. There was always something a bit pathetic about him and the power Gemma had to hurt him that kind of prevented that.

But there are gaping holes in this book! Firstly, how on Earth does Ty get her onto an international flight from Bangkok to… I don’t know? Darwin? Perth? It’s never quite clear where they are, it could be anywhere in remote WA, NT or QLD or maybe even far northern SA. There’s mention of a mine that’s within reasonable driving distance, but apart from that, I don’t actually know where they are. But it remains that Ty had a fake passport for her and got her, borderline comatose, through check in, customs, onto the flight, off the flight, through customs again, etc. I’ve seen Australian passports and while I’m sure there are plenty of fake ones about, surely they’re not easy, or cheap, to come by. It’s never explained how Ty secured a false passport for Gemma (he doesn’t use hers, he states that he has one in a false name to throw off police/media/etc when her parents discover her missing) and he has presumably purchased airline tickets in this same false name.

Secondly, the narrative is very, very vague about money. Ty is Australian, grew up in the outback but then went into foster care and after that spent some time in London. He comes back to Australia and presumably spends quite some time putting his plan into action – building the cabin, acquiring the huge amount of supplies he will need to live in the cabin for the distant future. Gemma does ask him how he came to have the funds to do this, especially after it’s revealed he was in London for some time and although he does give some answers, it wasn’t really enough to satisfy me. There’s also a question of how he came to know the area they were in – he did grow up in the outback but his father had a farm and the area in which he has chosen is not able to be farmed so it’s not as if that’s where he is from. It all just felt a little too convenient – Ty had little education and didn’t seem to have ever held a proper job but he had both the money and knowledge to carry out this plan.

Gemma’s sort of Stockholm Sydrome also seemed to show up at a very odd time (when she was actually given a chance to leave) which seemed nothing more than at attempt to draw out the novel a little bit and make a bit of drama at the end for would Gemma testify against Ty or would she refuse to say she’d been taken and claim she was there of her own free will. For almost the entire book she loathed him and couldn’t wait to leave, begged him desperately to let her go, nearly killed herself attempting to escape him and then when it came that she absolutely had to leave and that he would take her and run, she refused to let him go, wanting him with her. It just struck me as inconsistent – I know that Stockholm Syndrome is very real but the timing of this just didn’t seem to gel. It was a bit like Ty and Gemma’s history itself – far too convenient.

For me this novel had a lot to like – the way the outback was portrayed and I enjoyed the dynamic between Ty and Gemma and their complicated interactions until the end. It was far easy to believe and be connected to Gemma when she was fighting Ty but I found the swing to sympathy for him, and perhaps something else, unbelievable. And while I never hated Ty, I never liked him either. His tragic past was not enough to be okay with what he did to Gemma. The cynic in me found a few things to nitpick and this did ruin the overall power of the story. Things not explained correctly when they seemed very important, coincidences ahoy and a bit of a sloppy ending lower the rating on this one.

6/10 ...more

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Apr 14, 2020 Tanya rated it it was ok

Can I just started off with a rant? Who the hell declared this book a romance? People are actually shelving and considering this is a romance story? Yeah, no, it's not. There is nothing romantic in this story. If you're reading this and actually thinking it's a love story, I'm genuinely concerned about the relationships in you life.

So, Stolen is essentially the story of Gemma. She's kidnapped from Bangkok airport and taken away to a shack in the middle of the desert. The whole book is a letter s ...more

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