Rating: WORTHY!
Nicely read by Kate Rudd, I felt that this novel exemplified my problem with first person voice precisely because this was not written in first person! It would have been obnoxious to me if it had been first person because there was a bit too much info-dumping and lessons on being blind, and these were told rather than shown. It was written for a younger audience than I represent, but sometimes it felt like it had been written for a middle-grade audience than a YA one.
That said, and the occasional annoyances aside, for me it was eminently listenable as a third person story. I applaud April Henry for that! It started out very strongly and really drew me in. Then a bit later towards the end, it started going slightly south and I remember thinking, "Oh no! Here we go again!" but it rallied and came back strongly at the very end, so I'm very grateful to the author for that too, and happy to rate this as a worthy read (or listen!)!
The main characters are sixteen-year-old Cheyenne Wilder, the daughter of a Nike executive, and Griffin, the boy who kidnaps her inadvertently when he steals the Cadillac in which she's sleeping when Cheyenne's step-mom goes into the pharmacy to pick up her antibiotic prescription.
Griffin is heading out of the mall parking lot when Cheyenne makes her presence known, but he's not about to stop and let her go so she can report him and describe him to the cops. It's then that he learns she's blind. Still he doesn't stop, but he assures Cheyenne that he will return her to a safe place for pick-up by her folks when it gets dark. Unfortunately his dad and two jerks who work for his dad discover that she's actually the daughter of a rich man, and decide to hold out for a ransom. As the negotiations go on, Cheyenne realizes that she needs to escape or she'll end up dead, and although she's grown a relationship with Griffin, she doesn't feel she can trust him to help her. She must go it alone.
There were some issues (as other reviewers have pointed out) such as the question of why money seemed so important to a family which seemed to be doing pretty decently from their chop-shop business, but I didn't let that bother me. Avarice is the only motivation some people need! The biggest issue for me was the story coming to a screeching, jarring halt near the end, when the author decided inexplicably to give us a couple of chapters of Griffin's history! She'd had the entire novel in which to do this during conversations between Griffin and Cheyenne, yet she halted the whole story just when it was getting really exciting and dumped it all right there. I skipped it and didn't miss it. The ending was good enough however, for me to forgive that and recommend this story overall, as a very worthy read.
