Bone Gap by Laura Ruby

Bone Gap by Laura Ruby is one of the books on next year's Sequoyah awards list. The list for 2017 is fantastic, so I figured this book must have some merit. But when I started it, I wasn't so sure I would like it.

Finn O'Sullivan has been kind of an outsider his whole life. He is a little bit dreamy and he doesn't really pay a lot of attention to what is going on around him. I thought I knew what was up with him, but I was wrong. His mom left a couple years ago to live out of state with her new, rich husband, who doesn't like kids. She left Finn in the care of his older brother, Sean, who gave up his med school dreams to stay with Finn.

Then Roza came. She was beautiful. Everyone said so. Also, she was sweet and kind. Everyone loved her. At the county fair one day, Finn watched her be kidnapped. He described the man who took her as well as he could, but no one believed him. Everyone in town thinks he had something to do with her disappearance.

Here's where it went wonky for me. The second chapter is told from Roza's point of view. She's being held by her kidnapper in a house she can't get out of. She is afraid to eat the food and she doesn't have any shoes. This freaked me out. The guy kept showing up asking her if she loved him yet. I was afraid this was going to be one of those thriller type books meant to scare teenagers. But I noticed my friend Rachel gave it 5 stars, and she's a pretty hard sell. So I decided to keep reading.

Finn makes friends with a girl in town who has baggage of her own. She was extremely interesting. I really liked Petey (Priscilla) with her bees and honey and prickly personality.

Let's just say that it didn't go at all where I thought it was going. It was actually weirder and scarier than I expected. But that was actually better. It wasn't cheesy at all. It wasn't meant to be a warning to girls not to engage in activity that might get them kidnapped. It was just riveting.

8/10 bookmarks.