Stolen - A Letter to My Captor By Lucy Christopher.

Sixteen year old Gemma is kidnapped from Bangkok airport and flown halfway across the world. When she awakes, she finds herself in the hands of a man named Ty, in a desolate desert spanning miles and miles around her. He doesn't want to kill her. All he wants is for her to love him. He's been stalking her since she was 10, and planning their new life together the entire time. She has no chance of escape.

Documenting the bizarre months they spend together, this book shows how the lines between love, lust, loneliness and fear blur together when you live in isolation. Gemma starts off hating him and feeling utterly miserable.  

  

As the book goes on however, I personally couldn't help but go through Stockholme Syndrome with Gemma. Her curiosity about his motives encourages her to start talking, and I began feeling sympathy for him. Hearing about the struggles Ty faced in the past shouldn't make you feel any compassion towards him, considering what he did to Gemma, but somehow, you get sucked into his world and you begin to feel like you understand him. He truly believes he is saving her and giving her a better life, showing her things she would never have seen before, and he never once actually hurts her. The emotional pull you feel towards Ty should feel wrong, but he deserves happiness, like everyone does. 

“Lets face it, you did steal me. But you saved my life too. And somewhere in the middle, you showed me a place so different and beautiful, I can never get it out of my mind. And I can't get you out of there either. You're stuck in my brain like my own blood vessels.” 

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand that what he did was utterly unacceptable. But you can see that in his own twisted way, he loved her. She attempted to escape on more than one occasion, but each time she ended up close to death and Ty rescued and nursed her back to health every time. Whether she felt an attachment to him simply as a coping mechanism, a survival instinct and a basic need for human interaction, or whether under different circumstances they could perhaps have actually worked out as a couple, she begins to connect with him. The character development in this is mind-blowing.

I won’t spoil the ending for you, but even now, weeks after I turned the last page, I don’t know how I feel about it. This book will play with your mind and stick with you long after you have finished it. Definitely recommended!