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Summary
Summary
Jeff Hart was thirteen when a man kidnapped him at knife point. Now he's sixteen and back with his family. But how can he adjust to the "normal" life of a California teenager? What will it be like to see his old friends, even go back to school, when everyone is wondering exactly what happened to him? What does his family, and especially his father, think about the relationship he developed with his kidnapper? And how can Jeff live with himself after all he has been through?This powerful and unsettling novel explores the mind of a boy struggling to come to terms with who he was, and who he is now, after an experience that has changed his life.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-Abducted from a California rest stop and abused-physically, emotionally, and sexually-by his kidnapper for 2 Ù years, Jeff, now 16, is finally released and allowed to return home. Once a star athlete and quintessential "good kid," he is reunited with a family and friends who have become strangers and is caught in a maelstrom of emotions he tries desperately to suppress and deny. Once the apple of his father's eye, Jeff now has a strained relationship with him. His siblings are eager to reconnect, but treat him with a mandated fragility. Consumed with self-loathing, feeling ashamed and unclean, Jeff refuses to cooperate with investigators and name his abductor. The denial comes to haunt him when his kidnapper asserts that their relations were consensual, thus destroying the tentative trust Jeff had rebuilt with an old friend and making his return to school a nightmare of persecution. This is a strong, uncompromising first novel. Jeff's awkwardness and raw pain at having his outlook on life forever altered are drawn with a remarkable sensitivity and honesty. Supporting characters are equally well realized, with each individual differently, yet relatedly affected by the teen's abduction. There can be no instant resolution, ironically no return "home," and there is none. Jeff's emotional scars run deeper than the physical ones scored on his back. There is, however, positive motion toward healing. At last, the boy begins to talk, breaking through his denial and expressing his anger. A powerful, difficult, yet cathartic read.-Jennifer A. Fakolt, Denver Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kidnapped from a roadside rest stop by a man named Ray, 16-year-old Jeff has spent the past two and a half years locked in a dark basement. He was whipped, mentally abused and forced to have sex with his captor if he wanted to eat. Now his kidnapper has brought Jeff home. The first half of this tautly written debut reads like a thriller: Jeff, the narrator, relates his gruesome history in bits and pieces; initially, he's wrapped up in twisted loyalty to Ray, who begins to stalk his family. The author builds the tension to an almost unbearable peak in scene after scene, such as when Ray leaves the clothes in which the teen was kidnapped on Jeff's front steps or when RayÄstill anonymousÄchats with Jeff's father in public while the threatened teen chooses not identify him. Jeff is in deep denial about his repeated rape; looking at mug shots and rap sheets for the FBI, he cries out, "Why is every man in there some kind of sick rapist pervert?... I told you Ray isn't like that." About halfway through the novel, Ray is caught, and the breakdown of Jeff's denial makes up the rest of the book. Jeff's recovery is sensitively and dramatically handled, but the tension eases up as he no longer seems threatened and as the mystery of what really happened to him is revealed to match everyone's initial assumptions. Although it doesn't quite deliver on its promise of suspense the whole way through, this chilling story will put readers through an emotional wringer. Ages 12-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
Nearly three years after being abducted, sixteen-year-old Jeff is released by his kidnapper. The plaintive first-person narrative details Jeff's readjustment to family and friends, his guilt over the sexual abuse he suffered, and the continued presence of Ray, the abductor who continues to make ominous appearances even after Jeff is home. Not every aspect of this debut novel is fully convincing, but much is brutally honest and compelling. From HORN BOOK Spring 2000, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
An accomplished, intense, and powerful first novel about what happens when a kidnapped boy is returned to his family. After two and a half years, the man called Ray, who stole Jeff from his family at a roadside rest stop, delivers him back home. Atkins plunges into the depths of Jeff's tangled consciousness, conjuring his terror, his bottomless degradation, his lingering horror of himself over what he did to survive. While who Ray was and what he did to Jeff remain mostly unstated, the effects on Jeff are ghastly and transparent. Jeff's intelligent, driven father, who has lost so much of his own life in the search for his son, tries to control Jeff's recovery, too. While his rigidity is fearsome, the cost to him, and to Jeff's stepmother and siblings, is fierce. What Jeff has to face'his return to his family and to school, his dealings with the FBI and others who had searched for him, his ugly, overpowering emotions'is drawn candidly but never sensationally. Readers will not be able to view incidents of kidnapping and sexual abuse in the same way again. (Fiction. 13+)
Booklist Review
Gr. 10^-12. Atkins debuts with a harrowing journey inside the head of a kidnapped teenager released after more than two years of physical and psychological torture. Jeff disappears at a highway rest stop, forced into a van by a knife-wielding man named Ray. When he resurfaces, he is hostile and uncooperative: the scars on his back are but surface hints of the guilt, fear, and self-loathing he feels because of what Ray forced him to do. Leaving those details to a few horrifying but not explicit flashbacks, Atkins paints a compelling picture of a crime victim desperate for help but trained to reject it. Then she cranks up the pressure by having Ray return, in custody but with a tale about a runaway who became a willing sex partner. The prospect of Ray's release, a friend's loyalty, and his father's unwavering love finally batter down Jeff's wall of silence. Healing begins by the end, but it's obviously going to be a long, rocky road. The circumstances may be less ambiguous here than in Michael Cadnum's Zero at the Bone (1996), but they are no less haunting. --John Peters