Where It All Goes Down
The Great Sandy Desert of Australia, 2009
The Great Sandy Desert. Seriously, couldn't they have come up with a more creative name? If anything, though, the setting of Gemma's ordeal with Ty is fitting—for miles and miles, there's literally nothing but buckets of sand. Don't believe us? Here's a visual. How would you like to be stuck out there with a guy who may or may not be a psycho killer? Yeah, no thanks.
Part of what makes Stolen such a suspenseful, creepy book is the isolation Gemma experiences. True, kidnapping can be just as horrifying in the middle of a city as in the middle of nowhere, but still—with no hope of rescue and no sign of Ty letting her go, the absolute vastness of the desert makes for a frightening place to tell this story. "No one knows either of us are anywhere," Ty tells Gemma. "We're in the middle of the Australian desert. We're not even on the map" (8.25). Gulp.
The fact that this book is set in uncharted territory is more than slightly unsettling to us as readers. What about how it psychologically affects Gemma? Being abducted is bad enough, but in a way, the isolation of the desert makes her situation even more desperate. Check out her reaction to seeing a panoramic view of the desert when she climbs a tree in the Separates:
There was nothing but sand and flatness and horizon […] there were no buildings on the other side, no towns … not even a road […] Long, flat emptiness. I wanted to scream, probably the only reason I didn't was because I was worried you would hear me. If I'd had a gun, I think I would have shot myself. (17.4)
Maybe it's fear of never seeing her parents again, having Ty kill her, or simply never seeing anything except that desert for the rest of her life, but the setting plays a huge role in the hopelessness Gemma experiences throughout her captivity. In a way, she feels like being there is eroding away her life—"when that wind was up and blowing the sand around," she says, "it felt like it could blow my voice completely away from me, too. I was disappearing with those grains, scattering with the wind" (30.25). We'd say that sums up the odds against her pretty darn well.