A 15-year-old girl has spent the last five years being abused by a kidnapper named Ray and is kept powerless by Ray's promise to harm her family if she makes one false move. The narrator knows she is the second of the girls Ray has abducted and renamed Alice; Ray killed the first when she outgrew her childlike body at 15, and now Alice half-hopes her own demise is approaching ("I think of the knife in the kitchen, of the bridges I've seen from the bus... but the thing about hearts is that they always want to keep beating"). Ray, however, has an even more sinister plan: he orders Alice to find a new girl, then train her to Ray's tastes. Disturbing but fascinating, the book exerts an inescapable grip on readers—like Alice, they have virtually no choice but to continue until the conclusion sets them free.
Sing it, sister.
This book is like a punch to the gut. It's short, painful, and leaves you gasping. That's as far as I want to take that metaphor. This book is supremely unpleasant, a short novella-length narration by a girl who believes (correctly) that she has no power. She's been so carefully trained that even her thoughts do not belong to herself. The connection she draws in her mind between her ten-year-old self's selfishness, and her subsequent 'punishment' is heartbreaking.
Scott writes sparingly, sometimes only one paragraph or a few lines per chapter, for further emphasis. Alice, the abducted, spends her time alternately wishing for death and justifying her continued imprisonment.
On Amazon, almost all of the negative reviews relate to how graphic the book is. In fact, to me, at points it almost felt like a child abductor primer, a step-by-step instruction manual on how to beat the life out of children and bend them to your will. Other review talk about how abrupt the ending is. Interestingly, no one brings up the improbability of the ending, the confluence of events which made it possible for things to fall out as they did. Not to say too many spoilers, but the ending came as such a relief, that maybe that's why no one questioned it. In a book that sticks (for the most part) grippingly to realism, the readers need a bit of the fairy tale ending. Otherwise we'd all turn the last page and want to die. Or become social workers and police officers. The abruptness was fitting, because no matter how things shake out from here, Alice is content.
