LitPick Review
In Held, by Edeet Ravel, a seventeen year old girl named Chloe is kidnapped while volunteering in Greece. Locked away in a mystery location, she is terrified and lonely. It is not surprising that when one of her hostage-takers appears, friendly, handsome and apologetic, Chloe begins to have feelings for him. The story follows the kidnapper and kidnappee for four months, as Chloe's friends and family struggle for the retrials the kidnappers have given as the requirements for her release, and Chloe herself has to figure out if everything around her is real or a game her kidnappers are playing.
Opinion:
Held was a fantastic book. It was written with many details of Chloe's confinement, from stuffed monkeys to scented shampoos. Chloe's attention to miniscule details made me aware of how intensly lonely and bored she must have felt with little company and the huge amount of information we are so used to getting from the internet and television. I also enjoyed trying to figure out whether Chloe's feelings for her kidnapper were Stockholm Syndrome, true love, or just an attachment felt towards the only human she had had contact with for four months. Through some cleverly placed scenes, you also wonder if the kindness shown to Chloe was real or just a way to have Chloe think of the kidnappers as friends, and not want to get them in trouble. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes suspense and a story that will leave them trying to figure out the complex actions of the characters.
