Review: "Girl, Missing" by Sophie McKenzie

Review in short: great books for tweens and teens. I guess you'd like a bit more detail though? So here it comes, a full review of Sophie McKenzie's young adult book "Girl, Missing". The girl in question Lauren is not actually missing. She is living in London with her parents and she has always known that she is adopted. This has never really been an issue for her - what is an issue, however, is the fact that Lauren is very much becoming a teenager with all the mood swings and the feelings of being misunderstood and not fitting in. Luckily Lauren has a great friend, Jam, who is always there for her through thick and thin. So when Lauren finds a picture online that looks strangely like her as a toddler, she of course tells Jam. Trouble is, the picture is on a website about abducted children. Years ago a toddler in USA disappeared, a girl with almost the same name as Lauren and almost the same looks... Soon Lauren and Jam are on a transatlantic hunt to find out the truth about the toddler on the picture and about Lauren's childhood but someone definitely doesn't want Lauren to unearth the secrets of the past and it all gets dangerous...

Had I been 13 or 14 years old I would have absolutely loved this book. As it is, I am probably too old for it - nah, definitely too old for it - and I have to say that I found it hard to sympathy with Lauren. Her teenage moodiness and mood swings and her general being unfair to her parents and to Jam is pretty exhausting if you ask me. I understand but it is tiring! Luckily she realises her own selfishness at some point but it is a little late for me, I must say.

Read it if: You love contemporary quality YA or if you are 14 years old.

Review: "The Collector" - Obsessions

I had actually read this book before but I didn't realise it until I had read quite far and in the end it didn't matter because I couldn't remember anything about it anyway. That is one of the very few perks of having a bad memory - you get to re-experience great books and films over and over again.

"The Collector" by John Fowles is a great novel - his debut which I find extremely impressing. The narrator Frederick, who calls himself Ferninand, is damaged at best and outright crazy at worst. He is a 25-year-old orphan who has grown up in a loveless home with this aunt and cousin but who comes into a large amount of money when he wins at pools. Frederick is obsessed with Miranda, a 20-year-old art student from North London. Miranda is obsessed as well but not with Frederick whom she hardly notices. She is obsessed with being bohemian, arty, leaving her middle-class background behind and becoming part of the world that she adores and which is symbolized for her by G.P., an libertine and artist old enough to be her father.
However, Miranda comes face to face with Frederick's obsession with her and with love when she is kidnapped by him and imprisoned in his basement somewhere in the English countryside.

As the days go by Miranda and her captor circle each other in little power games where Miranda always has the upper hand except for the fact that Frederick literally has the key to her freedom and denies her the use of it.
What does Frederick/Ferdinand want from Miranda? She wonders and the reader wonders as well. I think Frederik himself wonders. He collects butterflies and Miranda is the triumph in his collection. He doesn't want anything from her except to have her.

It is a fascinating read because both Miranda and Frederick call for pity even though both of them are really quite annoying and caught up in their own webs of self-deceit. The story is more reminiscent of the plot in Lucy Christopher's "Stolen" which is like a YA version of "The Collector" than of "Room" by Emma Donoghue. However, all three books deal with the same topic, kidnapping, in a way that is worth reading.

"The Collector" is great. It is a piece of classic literary fiction and it deserves your attention.