Girl Stolen by April Henry; Henry Holt, 2010.
How would you feel if you were kidnapped? What if you were also blind and had pneumonia??? This is what happened to sixteen-year-old Cheyenne Wilder, who just happened to be sitting in a vehicle that was "car-jacked"! The car thief was shocked to find out that there was an unwilling passenger in the Cadillac Escalade that he decided to steal! The terrifying events that follow the surprising kidnapping will not only grip, but also hypnotize readers!
This story gets only more intense when Cheyenne is taken to a chop shop in the middle of nowhere, and the car thief's father finds out that she is the daughter of the iconic Nike owner! The fact that she manages to escape and elude her captors in the woods in the dead of winter is both amazing and ingenius! The way facts are woven into the plot give the reader insight into guide dogs and how blindness affects a person's senses.
This book was very well-researched, and the characters were extremely well-developed! The way that Cheyenne adapts to being blind is a tribute to both her persistance and her survival instinct. Cheyenne dupes her captor into thinking she is weak, and then uses that to her advantage in order to gain his confidence and escape. However, she eventually begins to relate to her kidnapper and actually tries to help him.
From the moment I picked up this book, I could not put it down. It is a gripping, intense story, and I was cheering on the heroine all the way through the story! I highly recommend it for high school and public libraries! It will be available on September 28, 2010, according to barnesandnoble.com.
