Girl, Stolen
Ratings9
Average rating3.4
Seventeen-year-old Cheyenne Wilder, blind and sick with pneumonia, is unintentionally kidnapped by Griffin, a kid pressured by his father to steal the car she was in. While Cheyenne becomes bait for ransom and wonder if she'll see her family again, she befriends Griffin and slowly plans her escape.
Girl, Stolen by April Henry has an amazing concept but a bit of a dull execution. After Cheyenne is kidnapped and ransomed, it kinda dragged on, full of her worrying, befriending Griffin, and slowly making a plan to escape her captors.
I wish the stakes were higher and we could feel the danger she was in. Sometimes it felt like just a huge info-dump about being blind. Although, it was very educational and taught me more about what it's like to be blind. Her pneumonia was kind of inconsistent in my opinion and was only to serve as a plot device to add suspense.
I want to like Cheyenne and Griffin's relationship, but I just felt like everything they talked it was an info dump about being blind or background stories about the characters. Which is nice to have, but they rarely talked about anything else.
Things pick up and get interesting near the 15% mark, but other than that, the book really dragged on. And I won't be reading the sequel. I can't say that I recommend this book, but I will say that isn't the worse I've seen on the market.
Girl, Stolen is a book that you have to step away from and mull over for a few days in order to really appreciate how you feel after reading it. I had no idea what I was going to be reading when I opened the book to the first page, and so I went in with a fresh perspective. Upon completing the book for the first time, I was hit with such a sense of (then unexplainable) awe that I wasn't sure how I felt overall. It stuck with me, and I was thinking about it for days afterwards.
That being said, Cheyenne has a ton to do with how much this book touched me. She was such a young protagonist (being 10 years younger than me) and yet she was so courageous! It may be a little cliche but the phrase “Everything I wish I could be...” pops into my mind. Cheyenne carries herself like a much older character throughout the story, making split decisions with calculating grace. There were times when my mouth fell open at her brilliant decisions and deductions. I kept thinking that if I were in her situation, well I'll be frank, I would have been screwed.
What really brings the story to life, and separates it from other books dealing with kidnapping that I've read, is Cheyenne's blindness. That isn't to say that it takes over the story. Instead it makes following Cheyenne extremely fascinating, because her world is so much the same and yet so different at the same time. Her inability to see that which is endangering her is so intriguing. Each time she describes how she uses her other senses to make up for her lack of vision, I was completely in awe. How many times had I actually stopped to think about how much I take advantage of my ability to see? Eye opener there my friends, truly.
There really isn't much else I can say without ruining the story for potential readers. The synopsis, sadly, already gives away so much and I want all of you to go in wondering what else April Henry has in store for you. If you are sitting there wondering “Well was it perfect?”, to that I counter you with - define perfect. Girl, Stolen really touched and entertained me, and those two qualities alone now allow it to take its rightful place in my stack of favorite books.