Stealing Candy by Stewart Lewis
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Format: Kindle E-Book
Source: Publisher via NetGalley
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Release Date: May 2, 2017
Total Pages: 288
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I received a free digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. In no way has this impacted my opinion of this book or the review provided below.
Description
Candy hates boarding school. As a junior, graduation is still eons away, and making films is the only way to survive the boredom. Until she is kidnapped.
Candy panics. Along Came a Spider, Ransom, Taken, Cellular… Candy knows how these movies end. The only reason anyone would abduct her is to get a payout from her rock star father. Except Candy and her father are estranged. There’s no way he’s going to pay.
But with every hour that passes, Candy’s fear slowly recedes. Being on the road is freeing, not to mention great material for a new documentary. And the more time she spends with her handsome captor Levon, the more she learns the whole scheme is not just about ransom. It’s about revenge. What began as a kidnapping is spiraling into a crazy road trip adventure as Candy and Levon find a lot of wrong ways to do the right thing.
My Thoughts
This was a struggle. I really dislike giving a rating of 1 star. You know, because I’m a super nice person in general and am a firm believer that all stories should have the opportunity to be told, but unfortunately I cannot justify anything more for this.
This book was unbelievable. I don’t mean that in a hip, positive way either. I literally mean that it was not believable. Most of it didn’t even make sense. Examples, you ask? Okay! Let’s start with the biggest and most obvious issue: Candy gets kidnapped and is TOTALLY FREAKING OKAY with it. Candy also gets on a plane without any form of ID (okay – I’m nitpicking, I know, but after all the unbelievable shit that went down in this book, it just really irritated me that not even something as obvious as THAT could be done right). I could go on and on, really I could, but that would get into spoilers which I’m trying to avoid.
Now let’s talk more about the characters. Not even they were believable. I found them to be incredibly under developed and thus irksome to read about. Candy, for example. I respect that she was a unique individual who beat to her own drum (I seriously encourage this in books and in real life – it’s refreshing!), and I liked that about her. I enjoyed that she was a bit of a free spirit, but that did not make it any less weird and hard to swallow that she was okay with being kidnapped. Perhaps if there was more background about Candy as a person (her history, what drives her, who she is, etc.), it could have made her actions throughout the book more believable. We get a little blurb about her, and we get some sparse details sprinkled throughout, but it isn’t nearly enough to justify why she would be okay with everything going on in the book. Levon isn’t any better.
Even the idea of a road trip wasn’t done well in this book. Road trip stories have SO MUCH POTENTIAL. You can meet people (okay I guess maybe not if you’re trying to say low key because you just kidnapped something or are a kidnap victim yourself), see cool stuff, and go to amazing places. As far as road trips go, this one sucks. Even for a kidnapping road trip, it sucks and offers nothing.
I think that the story had potential, but that it wasn’t executed in the best way to make an impact. The underlying theme here is supposed to be about righting a wrong (aka “revenge”), but it’s poorly executed. It’s like people who riot after something bad happens, it just makes NO SENSE. I’M GOING TO CAUSE TROUBLE BECAUSE SOMEONE ELSE CAUSED TROUBLE AND IT’S GOING TO BE OKAY BECAUSE I DO IT IN THE NAME OF JUSTICE! No. Just no. That doesn’t work. You are a fool if you think it does. Whew! Okay, rant over.
Overall, this one was unfortunately a disappointment. I know that this review is coming off a bit harsh, and I apologize for that, but I just really did not like it and had so many issues with it. I hope that maybe others can find some good where I did not.
I understand that for the sake of the story, books may not be 100% accurate, but how do you deal with situations where you just cannot get past the issues? Are you more likely to DNF or truck through and hope to get over it?
No Time for Tiny Bookshelves 