At fifteen, Alice knows her abductor/abuser is growing tired of her and will soon kill her, just as he killed her predecessor. Her only hope of escape is to help him abduct a new little girl for him to abuse. For anyone who has ever wondered how the Elizabeth Smarts and Jaycee Lee Dugards of the world were cowed into submission, this book will make you feel their pain and see into the twisted minds of the psychopathic child abuser. This book is well-written, difficult to put down, and deeply disturbing - not recommended for those under sixteen.

Sometimes novels can be a window into a dark truth, a truth no one wants to acknowledge, but also one cannot ignore. In a prose style more closely aligned with poetic verse, Elizabeth Scott paints a dark truth in her novel Living Dead Girl. The story is told through the eyes of an abducted ten year old, Alice, who has been held captive for the past five years. A stark, bleak, tormenting account of the daily excursions she is forced to live to make her captor happy in his delusional life provide the framing for the story. Alice is different from the pervious girl, if she can replace herself with another, then he will let her escape to her freedom. A novel written for young adults, I hesitate to agree with this marketing. This story is for the mature reader, one who will be able to understand the dimensions of power, and not feel desensitized at the dark imagery provided by Alice. This title is currently available in our library. Happy Reading! ( )

Incredibly disturbing. I don't think I can say much more than that. It really pushed me to be in "Alice's" situation and it wasn't hard to imagine--the writing was wonderful in that it put you right there in the present with her. This isn't a book I'd read more than once (once was enough) but it is a book that I would recommend people read (if you don't have a weak stomach) once.
Comment ( )

High School and Up - The narrator of Living Dead Girl is the second "Alice" to be abducted and abused by Ray. Taken from a school field trip when she was ten, Alice has survived five years with Ray, but the older she gets, the closer she is to meeting the same end as the first Alice.
In simple, stark prose, we are given the first-hand account of the title character's life with her abuser, made more chilling by the absence of words like "kidnapping" or "rape," and by the girl's own fear-fueled cruelty.
"Living Dead Girl" made the Teen Top 25 list from YALSA this year. Recommended for all teen collections. ( )

Reviewed by Me for TeensReadToo.com

I received my copy of LIVING DEAD GIRL right before it came out in September. I read it the same day, and promptly hid it in a huge stack of other books, hoping to forget about it. I didn't. I came across it last week, and sat down and read it again. This time, I knew that, just like before, I'd never forget it, but I finally decided I was ready to write a review on the story.

Alice has lived with Ray since she was ten. Now that she's fifteen, she knows her time with him is about to come to an end. The only question will be how it will happen - whether Ray will kill her, or whether she'll kill herself.

You see, Alice wasn't always Alice. She was once a girl with a mom and dad who loved her, until the day Ray abducted her during a school field trip. Although they don't live far from her childhood home, Alice has only once made an attempt to escape, and that was right after she was abducted. Ever since then, she's become the emotional/physical/sexual slave that Ray has turned her into, and she does what she's told, when she's told.

When Ray sets his sights on Lucy, a replacement girl, Alice couldn't be more thrilled. Her time with Ray is finally, finally coming to an end, and all she can do is experience immense relief. She may have a moment's doubt about setting up a small, young girl to go through the same torture and torment she has endured, but basically, that overwhelming sense of relief is all she can bring herself to feel.

Events unfold quickly, and the ending of the story is not a resolution so much as a beginning to an entire new set of complications.

I hated LIVING DEAD GIRL, in a way that made me love it. With a storyline that could have been ripped from today's newspapers, the feelings and emotions that it will invoke within you are myriad - horror, sympathy, outrage, disbelief. When I heard a similar story in the news about a year ago, my first thought was how a child who had been abducted could so willingly stay with their captor. What I learned through the pages of this book is that fear - the kind of fear many of us have never known, and will hopefully never have to know - is a huge motivator.

Alice lives by fear. Fear of eating something she's been told not to eat. Fear of talking to someone she's been told not to talk to. Fear of bathing when she's not been told to bathe. Fear of saying something, anything, in the wrong way, or at the wrong time, or with the wrong tone of voice. Fear, plain and simple, can cause people to do all sorts of things.

Elizabeth Scott is to be thanked for writing a story that brings the issue of child abduction to light. As Alice says, there are three life lessons: No one will see you. No one will say anything. No one will save you. Unfortunately, she's all too often right. I hope that after reading LIVING DEAD GIRL everyone will see, everyone will speak, everyone will be compelled to save.

Hope for Alice may be gone, but there are many Alice's out in the world, and thanks to this story, they don't always have to live in fear that no one will save them. ( )