Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott
My rating: 3/5 cats
I probably would have liked this book more if i were a teenager or a pedophile. I mostly just read this for science. it came up in my collection development class when we were talking about challenged books (that doesn’t mean that they are handicapped, but that they have been rarrred at by angry parents and other scared concerned types), but when i heard what it was about – i pretty much had to read it to see how an author handled this situation, because it seemed rough stuff for teen fiction. the basic premise – although i hate doing plot summaries – is that “alice” (the first-person narrator)is kidnapped when she is ten and physically and sexually abused for 5 years, but when she starts to develop physically beyond her captor’s personal preference, he enlists her help in selecting her own replacement. so -ew. and i don’t know anything about psychology, child or otherwise, so i don’t know the terminology, but she just completely shuts down, emotionally, into a not-quite-stockholm syndrome – she doesn’t align herself with him for anything but self-preservation, but she has just given up fighting and does what he wants, because he has made threats about hurting her family etc. so – she has all this freedom to leave the house and go to the park to find this new-child for him, but she can’t do anything to save herself, which is very frustrating for the reader. The author gets 5 stars cats for balls – for tackling the subject matter to begin with and for the ending which i’m sure had some people up in startled emotional flight mode. and as a cautionary tale, it should also get 5 stars cats, although a teen audience is a little old for the caution, and any younger readers would be traumatized beyond therapy. do not give this book to your 8-year-old. just tell them to stay away from unmarked vans. i just personally didn’t connect to it. the subject matter is horrifying, but in the abstract, and this character’s shutdown response didn’t make me want to save her so much as walk in, splash some water on her and say “snap out of it.” when i was little, these were my literary kidnapping equivalents:
and they were way more gentle in terms of what the girls went through, wayyyy fewer forced blowjobs, but it gave me a total sense of confidence – if i got my ass kidnapped, i could get out of it with my cleverness. i used to dream about being kidnapped, and the ways i would elude my tormentors. it’s probably a really good thing i was never actually kidnapped, because this here book is probably closer to the reality – feisty kids don’t always win, but this might have made me a little more of a shut-in, and may have ruined my devil-may-care years, so i would have lost some good adventure-stories. i didn’t personally love this book, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t be in a library. libraries are full of books. you don’t like this one, don’t write an angry letter, just go read another one. hell, i’m about to.
