Stolen is a disturbing and enthralling novel that follows the abduction of Gemma, a British girl traveling with her parents, by an older man named Ty, an Australian stranger. While at the airport, Gemma and Ty supposedly meet for the first time over coffee; he slips a drug into her coffee and then abducts her to Australia, feeding her drugs the entire time so she would not struggle.
When Gemma awakes in Australia, her first thought, naturally, is of escape. But she is greeted with a barren landscape of vast horizon and rusty sand—there is nobody around for hundreds of miles, and she has no way to escape. Through a strange series of events that show the humanity in even the most inhumane, Gemma alternatively comes to hate and love her abductor, a situation known as Stockholm syndrome.
Christopher writes with such passion and poetry; the descriptions of the landscape heighten the mysteriousness of Ty and the desolateness of Gemma’s emotional mindset. Certain episodes, like Ty’s capture of the camel and Gemma and Ty sleeping underneath the stars, are so well-written I felt as if the scenes were playing on a screen in front of me.
The ending is both exhausting, heartbreaking, and heartwarming—quite a feat for a young adult novel, especially a seminal effort by Christopher.
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