Stolen

Stolen is a genre hybrid, combining elements of thriller and romance for a young adult audience. In keeping with the thriller genre, Stolen features a high-stakes mystery that involves danger to the protagonist (Viteri, Tika. “What Is the Difference Between Mystery, Suspense, and Thriller Novels?” Book Riot, 18 July 2022). Like many thrillers, Stolen has a cinematic quality and an intense central conflict related to crime and violence. The remote setting of the Australian Outback mirrors the hostile situation Gemma finds herself in and contextualizes her imprisonment.

Alongside these thriller elements, Stolen integrates and subverts tropes from the romance genre to portray the emotional complexity of Gemma’s Stockholm syndrome. Before Ty violently kidnaps her, Gemma and Ty essentially experience a “meet-cute,” an amusing or charming, often public first meeting. Ty is described in attractive and romanticized terms. The second-person address of the novel, which is framed as a letter from Gemma to Ty, creates a feeling of intimacy and romantic intensity between the characters. Stolen is a dark, subversive meditation on the enemies to lovers trope, where two people who hate each other are stuck together and gradually fall in love. However, in this novel, the extremity of Gemma’s circumstance makes it hard for her to understand if any of her feelings are real.

Though Stolen features mature themes drawn from the romance and thriller genres, it remains a YA novel, featuring a teenage protagonist and rooted in her point of view. The novel captures elements of Gemma’s coming-of-age process as she has a formative experience that affects who she will be and how she will exercise her autonomy moving forward. The novel focuses on Gemma’s complex emotions, fears, anxieties, and desires that surface as she experiences the trauma of captivity and reevaluates her life.