Girl, Stolen by April Henry

Rating: WORTHY!

Nicely read by Kate Rudd, I felt that this novel exemplified my problem with first person voice precisely because this was not written in first person! It would have been obnoxious to me if it had been first person because there was a bit too much info-dumping and lessons on being blind, and these were told rather than shown. It was written for a younger audience than I represent, but sometimes it felt like it had been written for a middle-grade audience than a YA one.

That said, and the occasional annoyances aside, for me it was eminently listenable as a third person story. I applaud April Henry for that! It started out very strongly and really drew me in. Then a bit later towards the end, it started going slightly south and I remember thinking, "Oh no! Here we go again!" but it rallied and came back strongly at the very end, so I'm very grateful to the author for that too, and happy to rate this as a worthy read (or listen!)!

The main characters are sixteen-year-old Cheyenne Wilder, the daughter of a Nike executive, and Griffin, the boy who kidnaps her inadvertently when he steals the Cadillac in which she's sleeping when Cheyenne's step-mom goes into the pharmacy to pick up her antibiotic prescription.

Griffin is heading out of the mall parking lot when Cheyenne makes her presence known, but he's not about to stop and let her go so she can report him and describe him to the cops. It's then that he learns she's blind. Still he doesn't stop, but he assures Cheyenne that he will return her to a safe place for pick-up by her folks when it gets dark. Unfortunately his dad and two jerks who work for his dad discover that she's actually the daughter of a rich man, and decide to hold out for a ransom. As the negotiations go on, Cheyenne realizes that she needs to escape or she'll end up dead, and although she's grown a relationship with Griffin, she doesn't feel she can trust him to help her. She must go it alone.

There were some issues (as other reviewers have pointed out) such as the question of why money seemed so important to a family which seemed to be doing pretty decently from their chop-shop business, but I didn't let that bother me. Avarice is the only motivation some people need! The biggest issue for me was the story coming to a screeching, jarring halt near the end, when the author decided inexplicably to give us a couple of chapters of Griffin's history! She'd had the entire novel in which to do this during conversations between Griffin and Cheyenne, yet she halted the whole story just when it was getting really exciting and dumped it all right there. I skipped it and didn't miss it. The ending was good enough however, for me to forgive that and recommend this story overall, as a very worthy read.

The Body in the Woods by April Henry

Title: The Body in the Woods
Author: April Henry
Publisher: Macmillan
Rating: worthy

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.

Errata:
p75 "A Lexis" should be "Alexis".
p80 "cellophone?" "cellophane" maybe?
P149 "Her mouth water…" "Her mouth watering" maybe?

I enjoyed this novel a lot. It was well-written, with sufficient technical detail to make it sound authentic (to me anyway!), yet not with so much that you require a Tom Clancy official barf bag to deal. April Henry has some twenty or so novels out there for various ages, so I plan on looking up some more of her work. I did find some typos, which to me is really inexcusable in this day and age of electronic word processors and spell-checkers, but a lot of advanced review copies seem to be that way for some obscure reason. April Henry should ask me to beta-read her next novel!

Alexis, Nick, and Ruby are teens in high school who have volunteered and are in training for Search and Rescue. They're called at school one November afternoon to help find a missing autistic boy. The boy is found, but not by them. What they do find in their part of the forest, is the dead body of a young woman who has evidently been strangled. And the killer is watching as the EMTs and police show up. He takes a shine to Ruby - a natural redhead. I wonder why?

The three teens are quite different superficially, but have connections below the surface. Ruby is bordering on obsessive about crime scenes and serial killers. Nick likes to draw pictures his teachers think are disturbing. He has fantasies of military service, taking after his departed dad. Alexis is living with her mom, surviving on disability and foodstamps, and her mom is off her meds, paranoid, yet paradoxically behaving like a particularly irresponsible child.

Talking of irresponsible, this was refreshingly not one of those novels which has kids acting unilaterally without involving the police. The interactions between the kids and the law enforcement officers were well thought-out such that they felt realistic and responsible, whilst still giving the teens sufficient motive and room to act independently without them looking stupid for not involving the cops. It was nice to see an author demonstrate (for those less capable) how this can be done!

Something (which is initially unspecified) has happened between Alexis and Ruby, meaning they no longer hang out together, but all three decide they need to help catch this murderer, who is stepping up his game. He picks on homeless kids, since they're such easy targets when he approaches them pretending to be from a help organization, and handing out free gifts of gloves or chap stick. Some of the things he hands out contain GPS trackers, so he can sit in his office, or in the warm comfort of his home, and play his sick game of stalking his potential victims electronically.

There's a really oddball bit where an out-of-shape wannabe hiker tries to hike a trail that's only 1.3 miles, but who gives up before he finishes, and turns round to head back, but who then gets lost(!). The SAR team has to find him, but we’re told that it takes them an hour to get to him. I found that completely bizarre! It's not explained why it takes them an hour to hike less than a mile, but it does say that there are three routes, so the team splits into smaller groups to cover all three. It's possible, therefore, that this particular group took the long way around, but if that's the case, why didn’t one of the other two teams find him first? This just struck me as confusing at best and poorly written at worst. Actually, not even poorly written. I was impressed by the quality of the writing in this novel, so I should say poorly-planned instead.

Overall, however, I really enjoyed this novel and I recommend it. It has good characters who behave both naturally and intelligently, strong females, and a decent plot. It was a great thrill and a good ride, and it's well worth the reading. I liked how it was written, how the characters behaved and interacted, how there were plenty of red herrings, but not stupid red herrings, and how the plot slowly gathered around the real perp, with plenty of excitement and unnerving bits here and there.