Review: good start, needs work
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 7, 2014
The premise is interesting: a 17-year-old girl wakes up to find strange men in her house. Her mother's been gone for a week. She's been raised in isolation since she was 5, trained in martial arts, and forced to stay fully dressed at all times. She escapes, jumps in with the first friendly face she finds, and learns that the two men in her house were not the worst people to be hunting her. Soon she learns just how dangerous and complicated the world is, what her mother sought to hide her from, and just how extreme her upbringing was.I give the book 3 stars because some of the characters are unlikable in unexpected ways. A doctor blames her for being at the center of trouble that drives the story along. A psychotherapist speaks with sloppy grammar. Various adults in the story demand that she be more self-aware than real-world adults twice her age. I found the accusations that a 17-year-old girl is careening from crisis to crisis because she *wants* chaos in her life, and has no care for others around her to be extremely irritating. These may be normal flaws, but discovering that almost every character had these kinds of flaws seemed too much.