Pointe

In this suspenseful, absorbing novel, seventeen-year-old Theo Cartwright's best friend Donovan reappears after four years missing. Theo soon realizes his kidnapper is her (older) ex-boyfriend, Trent. Theo's first-person narration reveals both disturbing details of her time with Trent and her current conflicting feelings of guilt and jealousy: "Either Donovan ran away with my boyfriend...or I was charmed by the scum of the fucking earth."

As this suspenseful, absorbing novel opens, seventeen-year-old Theo Cartwright's best friend Donovan (one of the few other black students in her school) has been missing for four years -- long enough for Theo to have made new friends, reached a decisive moment in her serious ballet training, and recovered from the downward spiral of grief and anorexia catalyzed by Donovan's disappearance and her abandonment by older boyfriend Trent. When Donovan is found and the identity of the kidnapper is made public, Theo realizes that the kidnapper, thirty-year-old Chris Fenner, is Trent. As she agonizes over whether to tell anyone (and Donovan refuses to talk at all), Theo's first-person narration reveals both disturbing details of her time with Trent and her current conflicting feelings of guilt and jealousy: "Either Donovan ran away with my boyfriend...or I was charmed by the scum of the fucking earth." Readers will realize long before Theo does that despite her feelings for Trent, she too has been victimized. Meanwhile, an intense but illicit relationship with manipulative Hosea proves Theo still has a lot of healing to do. Can she find the strength to speak up for Donovan and herself? Through her unreliable -- but, as Theo herself ultimately comes to recognize, blameless -- narrator, Colbert confronts wrenching, often unacknowledged aspects of sexual abuse: a survivor's self-destructive shame, fear of revealing the abuse, and emotional attachment to her abuser. katie bircher