The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Kidnapped (review)

With her father dead and her mother and brother in jail, Michelle Peña has tried to put her street life behind her and pursue other talents, becoming a recordbreaking sprinter and something of an academic star as well. Most importantly, though, she has a new best friend, Kiki, and a single, gay foster father who loves her, even if he's a little stiff about showing it. When members of her former gang appear at her new school, she freaks, but when they come back later and kidnap her and Kiki, her street instincts kick in, and she reasserts her dominance over the boys in order to get free. Her former love, Silver, looks as good as ever, but gang life has hardened him, and she's not sure if there's enough sweetness left in him to redeem; meanwhile she's noticing feelings inside herself that are less than admirable—powerful, yes, but hard and dangerous. It's not until she sees what Kiki sees in her that she is really unsettled, though, and she must make a decision between life as the queen of a violent but powerful street gang and existence as a posh prep-school girl. The action-packed plot portrays gang life in all of its sordid glory—vast amounts of stuff, codependent relationships with complex codes of hierarchy, loyalty and betrayal, and the constant threat of violence and death giving everyday interactions an overwrought intensity. Although the first-person perspective is Michelle's, Kiki's responses are what keep average readers grounded; she is by turns excited, scared, angry, and shocked that her friend has so much violence in her, whereas Michelle is just trying to respond in ways that keep her alive both emotionally and physically. The lack of resolution at the end is hard to take, but it's rhetorically effective in that it resists pat answers to a situation that is anything but easy. Discussion will ensue.