


Thank you, Lucy, for making me love reading again. It felt as if it was almost fate when I instantly ran to the internet thinking “Surely, there are discussion pages out there somewhere.” And when I saw that Christopher was coming out with a sequel in just a month, I almost cried. The writing, the story, the characters, the imagery, everything was perfect. No book, movie, or TV show has ever captivated me and made me feel the way Stolen has. It was the first book I remember being unable to put down, and 10 years later I feel the same way. It was even better than I remembered, and I credited my 13-year-old self for her taste. The minute I woke up I reached for the book to finish what was left.

I was scared to reread it because I held its memory so close to my childhood heart I thought “What if it isn’t as good as I remember it? What if it makes me cringe?” And then I read for 5 and a half hours straight until my eyes couldn’t hold open any longer. I thought, what is something I can read that will make me love reading again? I immediately thought of Stolen. Now at age 23, it sat on my bookshelf for a decade, and I was desperate to love reading again, I now read books that were informative, educational blah blah. I read it twice when I first bought it and then didn’t pick it up again until yesterday. I never forgot that book, and for years I wondered why it stayed in my mind. But no book ever made me feel the way Stolen did. I turned to books to soothe me, to escape. I was in middle school and my family life was falling apart. I read Stolen probably 10 years ago when I picked it up at a school book fair.
