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1. By: Lucy
Christopher
Yuki Leach

2. Every day I write a letter to my captor
The man who kidnapped me and
took me far away from home
He loves me and knows me better than anyone else every could
Maybe he isn’t so bad after all…

3. Meet Gemma
• 16 year old female living in England with
mother and father who argues with her
parents non-stop.
• Typical teenager with normal friends and
school
• Has a need to be treated more like an adult
rather than as a child

4. Meet Ty
• Half Australian half Londoner
• Obsessed with Gemma when she was 10 years old; He met
a young Gemma, fell in love with her and decided the
only way to have her would be to kidnap her and take her
to the middle of the Great Sandy Desert
• Physically above average in strength
• Loner who prefers nature over communicating with
humans
• Somewhat a “wild child” running away at a young age,
living off the land

5. Synopsis
• 16 year-old Gemma meets an attractive man in
the Bangkok airport and thinks he looks familiar.
He drugs her coffee and takes her on a drug
induced journey. She finds herself in a small
house in the Australian desert. With no other
humans around, and not even a road to indicate
in which direction a town might be. She runs
away anyway. Her kidnapper, Ty, chases her
down. He does not hurt her, but he is too strong
easily subduing her even when she fights him.

6. Synopsis continued
• Ty brings Gemma back to his house and explains that she
has no chance of surviving in the desert if she tries to flee.
When she realizes how hopeless her situation is, she
threatens to hurt herself, but he stops her. For a few days
she stays in bed, refusing to eat. When she finally gets up,
Ty takes her outside and explains that he has brought her
to Australia because it is a beautiful, magical place. He
claims they are in an unmapped desert. This is a spot he
found as a child and has returned to as an adult. Nobody
else knows about the spot; he built all the buildings and
laid the pipe to bring water from a spring to the house. He
says he intends to keep Gemma forever.

7. Synopsis continuted
• Gemma watches Ty for days, hoping to learn his routine so she can
escape. He gets up in the mornings and goes into an outbuilding; he
returns to eat and sleep. Eventually she asks what he does in the
other building. He says he makes art. He lets her come with him to
see, but on the threshold he grabs her. Gemma panics, thinking he
wants to kill her. He only wants to prevent her from disturbing his
artwork, but before she realizes this, she thrashes around and
disturbs a great deal. When she calms down, she sees that Ty is
painting a desert scene that fills a whole room. He cries over the
damage she has done, and she begs him to let her go.

8. Continued still
• Gemma spends the next several days in bed, thinking about her parents and her life in
London. She wonders how long they will keep trying to find her. When she finally gets
up, she tells him she thinks she recognizes him from before the airport, and he admits
he has been watching her for six years—since she was ten years old. He claims she
should remember meeting him, but she does not.
• Ty tells Gemma that his mother, a Londoner, abandoned him to his Australian father
when he was born. He grew up on a farm in this desert. He knew no other children, but
he learned about the land from Aborigines who worked on the farm. One day his father
disappeared, and Ty ran wild in the desert for about a year until people realized he was
out there. They caught him and took him to an orphanage in the city, where he was
forced to live in a room without even a window. He despises the city, and he claims
that Gemma does too. He says that he did not steal her; he saved her.

9. The Change
• Ty has a nightmare about his past and shouts and screams
until Gemma gets up and consoles him. Still Gemma has
not entirely forgiven Ty and tries to escape by taking his
vehicle but does not succeed as the truck gets stuck in the
desert. Ty rescues her and takes care of her until her
burns have healed. Now Gemma has started to think of Ty
in a good way and Ty is happy with that. Ty wants her to
realize the importance and beauty of nature which was
the main reason he built this house in the middle of the
desert. For this purpose he paints his entire outhouse and
himself with colors that resemble nature. And this does it.
That day Ty and Gemma fall asleep outside the house, on
the sand itself. Gemma has now started falling for Ty.

10. End of Paradise
• The next day Ty leaves to collect snakes as their venom is
essential for the anti-venom that he is preparing. He
leaves a note for Gemma about his whereabouts and
unfortunately Gemma goes in search of Ty behind the
house near the water reserve and there a snake bites her.
Ty takes Gemma to the mine site/civilization for her
treatment after the anti-venom that he had preserved is
out of date. He is arrested and whilst receiving treatment
for her ordeal she is told that any feelings she had for Ty
were due to the Stockholm Syndrome.

11. The Question
• Was Gemma actually experiencing true
love or was it Stockholm Symdrome?
• The author Lucy Christopher leaves it up to
the reading in an open ending to choose
the answer to this question for themselves.

12. YAL
• At what age do teens realize what “love”
actually is?
• Discovering self/identity (inner strength)
• Overcoming familial struggles and decision
making because of them
• Many many more themes

13. Awards
• Branford Boase award
• Prime Minister's Literary Awards
• Printz Honor Award
• Southern Schools Book Award
• Gold Inky
• Hull Children's Book Award

14. Still not convinced it’s a good
read?
• “I must have looked away for a moment, to watch the planes taking off
behind the glass. There was a jumbo jet teetering on its back wheels, black
fumes hanging in the air behind. There was another lining up to go. Your
hands must have been quick, tipping it in. Did you use any kind of distraction
technique, or was nobody looking anyway? It was some kind of powder, I
suppose, though not much of it. Perhaps it looked like sugar. It didn’t taste
any different.”
• “You were watching me, your eyes wide. I opened my mouth to tell you I was
fine, but I didn’t understand what came out. It was just a jumble of noises,
my tongue too thick and heavy to form words. I remember the lights turning
into blurs of blazing fire. I remember the air-conditioning chilling my arms.
The smell of coffee smudging into the smell of eucalyptus. Your hand was
tight around mine as you grabbed me and you took me and you stole me
away.”

15. Works Cited
• Christopher, Lucy, Steve Wells, and
Christopher Stengel. Stolen. New York:
Chicken House/Scholastic, 2010. Print.