Still Missing

Reading this so close on the tail of Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight, and Gina DeJesus being rescued in Cleveland (where I live) was not done on purpose. Annie is a realtor kidnapped from an open house and kept captive for a year. The book is set up as being told by Annie to her therapist. Just a fascinating book and horrifying at the same time. A good read, but it will break your heart.

Oh, also, I hope that Annie and the cop get together. Just a side, but I think that they would be great for each other... ( )

3 1/2 stars. Enjoyed but it was quite awhile ago. ( )

Wow. All I can say is ......WOW ( )

I DID enjoy this book but in a somewhat disturbing way. This is not a book for the faint of heart, and parents - the descriptions of some violent acts can be EXTREMELY graphic in some parts (so I would add a caution to kids thinking this is a YA book). To summarize, the story has to do with a real estate agent, Annie, who is abducted by a truly demented man. It is told through her eyes during a series of visits to her psychologist. I can't get too much into it without giving the story away to some of my readers, so spoilers follow...

Annie is brutally kidnapped, raped, and forced to live with this man who controls her every move, every pee, and every swallow. She becomes pregnant and he refuses to get the newborn the medical care she needs causing the infant's death. Annie is, of course, traumatized by the experience, and finally kills him when she hears him say they'll just try to get another one right the "next time." You want to cheer aloud during this time, you hate the Freak so much...

The story also recalls her escape and the after effects of when she comes home. At times, I thought I saw things coming, but I was truly surprised that her parent would seriously be that demented in setting this up. SERIOUSLY???? Whose parent DOES that????

Annie's character seems to be right on - she is a messed up bundle of nerves, but you can't help but cheer for her and root her on to achieving a peace within herself. At some points I want to wrap my arms around her, and other times, I want to help her kick some butt!!! I just loved her.

This is a CREEPY read - you can't quite trust any of the characters. Maybe it was the tone in my audiobook, or maybe it was just that the Freak freaked me out too. I always wondered what was behind the actions of others, and was not quite expecting the end results. This is the debut novel for Chevy Stevens? WOW. Great things are to come, that's for sure!

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Extremely twisted commercial thriller in the vein of Dean Koontz. Told in the first person from the perspective of Annie, a realtor who was abducted while conducting a tour of a vacant house she had been contracted to sell. After being imprisoned, beaten, raped, and tortured for upwards of a year, Annie
finally sees an opportunity to kill her captor and escape. As the novel opens she is telling the story for the first time ever, and the listener is a psychiatrist.

Annie describes her experiences in monologues that are the equivalent of one-hour sessions with her shrink, scheduled weekly over a period of months. This is important because it allows her to incorporate events that take place after the escape, when the police begin to investigate the case and the plot thickens unexpectedly. But it also chops up and extends the description of Annie's abduction, a story it would be hard to read undiluted, which the author milks for maximum effect.

Annie calls her captor The Freak. The Freak is the kind of psychotic killer found often in commercial fiction and rarely in life - calm, controlled, and capable, he builds an impenetrable cabin in the woods, expensively furnished to defy Annie's attempts at escape, and forces her to live in a kind of nostalgic fantasy world where he is the all-powerful head of the household and she, as the woman, must cook and clean and obey his every command. Like an extreme version of an abusive husband, he is tender and caring when she is obedient and violent when she is not; Annie is almost as horrified by his sweetness as she is by his cruelty. There are long descriptions of The Freak's attempts to rape Annie, her resistance and finally her submission to his sexual demands; the author dwells, for example, on The Freak's disgust at Annie's menstruation, and his pride when she finally becomes pregnant.

Annie gives birth to a baby girl, but The Freak decides the child is "weak" and kills it, promising they will make a stronger baby next time. This sends Annie over the edge, and she soon seizes an unlikely opportunity to murder her captor by cracking his skull with an axe. After a harrowing return to civilization from her cabin in the woods, Annie finds herself in the middle of a new kind of torture: a three-ring media circus. The story of her abduction, and her escape, makes her a grotesquely heroic figure and reporters of all kinds dog her every step, snapping pictures and begging for interviews.

As the police look into the circumtances of Annie's abduction, they realize that The Freak was not acting alone. It turns out that Annie's mother, a self-centered and vain woman, paid The Freak to abduct her own daughter - knowing that he was an ex-con and probably psychotic, she wanted him to keep her daughter for a week and then release her, hoping that the story would make the news and expecting to capitalize off of the ensuing attention to get on Oprah, or profit via a movie deal. I did not find Annie's mother to be a particularly realistic character; to the end, she is shocked by the accusation that she is a bad mother, or that she is at all to blame for what The Freak did to her daughter. I simply didn't buy extreme self-centeredness as a sufficient motivation to mastermind her daughter's abduction; the mother character acted like an arch-villainess but was consistently presented as a sad and pathetic figure.

The writing here is fine but not extraordinary, and Annie has a clear and distinctive voice - a kind of bitter, cynical, tough-cookie way of describing events. There is a real market out there for books of this kind and The Freak, by forcing Annie to live out a parody of old-fashioned domesticity, is designed to titillate and disgust. It pushes all the right buttons, but doesn't rise above its horror-porn genre.
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