Need something to read? Check out this book list...
1) "The Twisted Window" by Lois Duncan
Another page-turner by the ever-reliable Duncan, this time demonstrating how preconceptions can lead to dangerously wrong conclusions. Tracy Lord, 16, is an unwilling guest in the Texas home of her aunt and uncle, and angry at her father's decision to let her live there instead of with him after her mother's untimely death. Holding herself' aloof from her classmates, she is nonetheless drawn to Brad Johnson, who introduces himself as a fellow newcomer. Tracy, a veteran of New York City, is street-smart enough to figure that all is not as it seems, and Brad soon reveals that she's right. He's on a quest to find his toddler stepsister, child-snatched by his stepfather during a custody visit. Tracy, inspired by her own anger at her father, agrees first to help Brad find Mindy and then to help him snatch her back. It is only when they are on the road to his New Mexico home that Tracy discovers the truth: that Mindy is dead and that Brad's serious emotional problems have led them into the actual kidnapping of a substitute child. The balance of the book is a desperate chase sequence as Tracy, with the help of Brad's friend Jamie, tries to save ""Mindy"" from Brad and Brad from himself. Duncan is a true pro, grounding the twists of her plotlines with sure motivation and providing the reader with several surprises along the way. Though her writing is undistinguished, it never cheats or disappoints, allowing the reader to believe even this most melodramatic of stories.
2) "Abduction!" by Peg Kehret
In a highly suspenseful but simply written kidnapping story, 13-year-old Bonnie tries to find her five-year-old brother, Matt, when the boy is taken by his sociopath father, whom he’s never met. Kehret tells the story from many different perspectives, including those of Bonnie, Matt and the kidnapper, Denny. She dramatizes the police and community efforts to find the boy, and highlights Denny’s twisted personality as well as little Matt’s responses to his predicament and the missed opportunities of others who inadvertently come into contact with the case. When Bonnie decides to pursue Denny on her own, her efforts lead to a dramatic climax that may put her own life in danger. Kehret writes these stories over and over again, but she always demonstrates a deft touch in maintaining suspense while keeping her narrative light enough for the age of her intended audience. It’s entertaining and enlightening for older children as well as some reluctant adolescent readers. (Fiction. 9-14)
3) "Three Days" by Donna Jo Napoli
Eleven-year-old Jackie is enjoying mightily her father-daughter trip to Italy—until her father suffers a heart attack while driving back to their hotel one evening. As if this is not terrifying enough, when a pair of men pull over to help (she thinks), they instead kidnap her and take her to their house in the Calabrian countryside—but why? Once there, Jackie meets Claudia, a kind but mysteriously sad woman who seems to want her to be happy there. Napoli’s (Albert, p. 263, etc.) choice of a first-person, present-tense narration is particularly effective here; it isolates the reader in Jackie’s reality just as much as Jackie herself is isolated without recourse in a place where she cannot even understand the language. She emerges as a perfectly ordinary child who wants nothing more than to return home to her mother, but whose desperate need for any security at all within her bizarre circumstances causes her to cling to the only thing that is familiar now, her captors. Jackie’s situation is highly compelling, but the narrative motor that drives it is just as highly contrived: it turns out that Claudia has recently lost her own daughter, and the two men, her father and brother, have decided to kidnap Jackie as a replacement. While perhaps emotionally convincing within the terms of the story, it nevertheless strains credulity to the limit in every other way. Still, if readers are sufficiently grabbed by Jackie’s ingenuous voice and her remarkable predicament, they may be willing to forgive the contrivance for the experience. (Fiction. 9-12)
4) "Counterfeit Son" by Elaine Marie Alphin
In a kind of
Talented Mr. Ripley with a brutal back-story and a more moral protagonist, Alphin (Toasters, 1998, etc.) mines the provocative field of identity, memory, and lies. Fourteen-year-old Cameron Miller had been the virtual slave of Pop, an evil man who got his jollies by torturing and killing young boys. Cameron, who is more intact, psychologically, than seems possible for a victim of such severe, long-term abuse, survived by being totally obedient. During his long hours of imprisonment in the basement, Cameron read and reread all of Pop’s files, which detailed the lives and families of the various boys Pop murdered. A wealthy family of hobbyist sailors captured Cameron’s imagination—“at first because of the sailboats” and “in the end, because of their money”—and after Pop is killed by the police, Cameron claims to be their missing son, Neil Lacey. The police are skeptical, but the senior Laceys are overjoyed and immediately accept him as theirs. Alphin convincingly delineates the ambivalence felt by Neil’s siblings, and her portrayal of how Neil’s disappearance and reappearance all but destroyed the family dynamic is first-rate. The novel bumps up the suspense a notch when one of Pop’s criminal cronies shows up and threatens not only Cameron’s newfound security but the safety of the other Lacey children as well. The resolution tries to have it both ways and the ending is more than a little improbable. Still, an engrossing, suspenseful novel that is sure to keep the reader glued to the page. (Fiction. YA)
5) "Stolen Children" by Peg Kehret
Already feeling responsible for her father’s recent death, 14-year-old Amy takes a babysitting job for wealthy Mrs. Edgerton, and right off the bat she and her three-year-old charge Kendra are kidnapped. Taken to an abandoned cabin by two bumbling, small-time criminals, the girls are offered for ransom, but instead of sending notes, the kidnappers videotape the girls and send DVDs to the parents. However, Amy has the wherewithal to send coded messages in the tapes, and part of readers’ enjoyment is watching the filming and seeing if the parents can decode the messages. Kehret uses a third-person voice, allowing readers to follow the well-orchestrated actions of the various characters—kidnappers, hostages, parents, detectives, the nanny and other players who don’t even realize they are players. The story is fast-paced, plot-driven and involving, with comic relief provided by the captors’ fumbling machinations and little Kendra’s behavior. A sure hit for the intended audience. (Thriller. 9-11)
6) "Pretty Girl-13" by Liz Cooley
The opening chapters of Coley’s debut for teens will chill readers to the bone—unfortunately, the rest of the novel fails to deliver.
The haunting description of 13-year-old Angela Chapman’s abduction from a Girl Scout camping trip and her mysterious return three years later has all the makings of a deeply disturbing but satisfying psychological thriller. With a combination of third-person narration and first-hand accounts by the multiple personalities Angie’s created to protect herself from the trauma of her abduction and sexual exploitation, the structure of the novel is innovative and rich with potential. Rather than reveling in the complexities of Angie’s broken psyche, however, the story spoon-feeds readers critical pieces far too quickly. For example, the day after her miraculous return, Angie has her first therapy session, at which she falls immediately under hypnosis and leaves with a diagnosis. Readers are cheated out of the pleasure of suspense. For a novel about a young girl’s miraculous return to her family and community, there is also a surprising and disappointing lack of emotion. Even though her friends thought she must have been dead, Angie’s return to La Cañada High School feels more like the popular girl coming home after a stint in rehab than the return of someone who has survived the truly unimaginable.
It simply doesn’t ring true. (Psychological thriller. 14 & up)
7) "The Vanishing of Katharina Linden" by Helen Grant
Grimm and grimmer fairy tale meets terror in a small German town where girls are being abducted again as they were 50 years ago.
English author Grant’s loosely plotted debut opens in Teutonic tragi-comic fashion as the narrator’s grandmother, wreathed in hairspray and close to a naked flame, explodes at the dinner table. But domestic horror is only one facet of a story that also includes traditional folk tales, a vision of a gossipy, vaguely malevolent local community, children in peril and the ordinary trials of unpopular, ten-year-old Pia. Daughter of a British mother and German father who bicker constantly, Pia is ostracized at school, her only friend a boy named StinkStefan. When first Katharina Linden and then other girls go missing, Pia begins to ask questions, discovering that some girls also disappeared just after the war, including Gertrud, the daughter of her elderly friend Herr Schiller, whose sinister brother Herr Düster is suspected of blame. More girls disappear, Pia’s parents decide to separate and Düster falls under suspicion again, leading to Pia and Stefan’s decision to break into his house. The implausible denouement is composed of an interminable sequence of scares and spooks.
Atmospheric moments punctuate a story marked by uncertainties of pace and logic which, despite gruesome content, is probably intended for younger readers.
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