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    Hostage Three
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    Hostage Three
    Unavailable
    Hostage Three
    Ebook337 pages4 hours

    Hostage Three

    By Nick Lake

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    From the author of the Michael L. Printz award–winning novel In Darkness comes a critically-acclaimed, fast-paced thriller that's as dangerous as the seas on which it's set.

    The last thing Amy planned to do this summer was sail around the world trapped on a yacht with her father and her stepmother. Really, all she wanted was to fast-forward to October when she'll turn
    eighteen and take control of her own life.

    Aboard the Daisy May, Amy spends time sunbathing, dolphin watching and forgetting the past as everything floats by . . . until one day in the Gulf of Aden another boat appears. A boat with guns and pirates – the kind that kill.

    Immediately, the pirates seize the boat and its human cargo. Hostage One is Amy's father – the most valuable. Hostage Two: her stepmother. And Hostage Three is Amy, who can't believe what's happening. As the ransom brokering plays out, Amy finds herself becoming less afraid, and even
    stranger still, drawn to one of her captors, a teenage boy who wants desperately to be more than who he has become. Suddenly it becomes brutally clear that the price of life and its value are two very different things . . .
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateNov 12, 2013
    ISBN9781619631496
    Unavailable
    Hostage Three
    Author

    Nick Lake

    Nick Lake is a children’s book editor at Harper UK. He received his degree in English from Oxford University. His Blood Ninja trilogy was inspired by his interest in the Far East, and by the fact that he is secretly a vampire ninja himself. Nick lives with his wife and daughter in England. Visit him on Twitter @NickLakeAuthor.

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    Reviews for Hostage Three

    3.5/5

    38 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Amy is an unwilling traveller, still mourning her mother's death, sailing with her father and stepmother on ayacht for the summer. When Somalian pirates seize their boat, Amy, her parents and the crew become important only for the money they can bring. Even so, Amy develops a relationship with one of the pirates.
    • 4/5
      Hostage Three starts with a bang, with Amy and her family already taken hostage, and then it travels back in time a few months. This really lets me get a sense of who Amy is, and what is going on with her. I know that something will happen and a bit of her mindset when it does, but I get to see how her mind normally works and processes. She thinks that she is ordinary and she is also struggling with the loss of her mother. She doesn't have the closest relationship with her Dad and stepmom, but she is definitely acting out. I felt for her pain, and for her confusion and longing for attention and have been there in certain ways myself. I ate up all of her memories of her mother and really enjoyed how that was woven into the story, however painful and emotional. Once her and her family were hostages, I really found myself experiencing a high range of emotions with them, and not wanting to put the book down, but to read just one more page. The pirates had a range of personalities and their own codes of behavior. I begrudgingly ended up respecting Ahmad, the leader in some ways, and surprised myself by how much I enjoyed the character of Farouz. As he and Amy talk and share their stories, his is so complex and it is not so cut and dry anymore that he is purely a bad guy. Sure, he is doing bad things to people, but I'd never really considered motivations behind their actions. The plot was pretty layered and touched on a lot, depression, forbidden love, and questions of the future. The theme of family is strong in this one, showing the many different ways loyalty and sacrifice can look like. How we carry memories in our hearts, how it hurts to remember, but they are also a source of strength. But it also shows how painful it can be to have attachments and what we can be forced to do. The ending is pretty well done, and I can't think of any other way that it could possibly be realistic. It is bittersweet, but laced with hope and the ever present pain, but learning to heal and let go. Bottom Line: Fast paced and emotional.
    • 3/5
      Hostage Three is told in the first person from the point of view of Amy, a teenager who's just finished up the UK-equivalent of high school and who has been cajoled into using her "gap year" to travel around the world on a luxury yacht with her father and stepmother. Her relationship with her family is chilly, and she doesn't have much choice but to go along with the trip. When the boat is boarded by pirates off the coast of Somalia, everything changes for Amy and her family.

      I don't think I would have enjoyed this book quite as much if Nick Lake didn't have a beautiful, lyrical way of writing. Every time I thought I was getting annoyed with the direction the story was taking, Lake would pull it back and make me care about the characters again. In the hands of a lesser author, the plot could have easily turned into something clunky or stereotypical. Amy could have gone two ways: she could have been very shallow and unlikable the whole time. I spent the first part of the book being incredibly annoyed by her attitude, but she grows and becomes more three-dimensional as the book goes on. Or she could have fallen into the role of white savior, "oh look at how enlightened I now am, I'm going to go save all the poor brown people". Fortunately, that doesn't happen, either.

      Amy was at times difficult to like, but I think that's a function of her character. She's a girl living a life of extreme privilege, and she doesn't come off as very self-aware about it at all. Her relationship with her stepmother is terrible -- usually that stuff gets semi-validated by having the stepmother be an actual terrible person, but it never felt like that to me in this case. It takes over 80 pages for Amy's stepmother to even get a first name (Sarah) -- she is referred to as "the stepmother" for about 95% of the book. In a flashback, Amy reveals the reason why she decided that she didn't like Sarah, which made me so angry because it was so pointless and such a BS reason. But it said a lot about Amy and how she let something very trivial define her relationship with Sarah. It's also sort of a defense mechanism, since Amy's real reasons for not liking her run a lot deeper, she just doesn't really know how to articulate those thoughts yet. She shows a lot of growth as the book goes on, and at the end you have a lot of hope for her that she'll be a better person.

      It also would have been easy to turn the Somalis into one-dimensional evil characters, but instead, Lake gives the two main Somali pirates, the young Farouz and the leader, Ahmed, a lot of depth. Through Farouz relating his life story to Amy, we learn a lot about the very real, tragic circumstances that have led some individuals in Somalia to take up piracy. Not being an expert in the subject matter, I can't speak to how true that part of the story was, but it certainly sounded consistent with real-world accounts and news articles that I've read.

      I was initially iffy about the romance aspect between Amy and Farouz, but ultimately I thought it was very well handled. Amy is in reality a fairly troubled girl who is starved for attention. Her father is always at work, she doesn't get along with her stepmother, and her mother died years ago. Despite being her captor, Farouz is kind to Amy and takes an interest in her and her life. He listens to her, something that no one else in her life really does. Amy acknowledges the strangeness and impropriety of falling for a guy who also carries a gun and who can be ordered to kill her at any moment. That doesn't stop her, but the thought's always there in her mind.

      As a side note, there is a point around 80% of the way through the book where something happens that, if I were the type to DNF books, I would have just closed out of this one and went NOPE NOPE NOPE. I don't want to spoil it, but when I got to this point, I went straight to Goodreads to check out reviews, something I usually don't do before I've finished a book. Seeing as there was no frothing at the mouth by any reviewer, I figured the plot was going to get straightened out, so I kept going. If you read this one, when you hit that point, keep going, resist the urge to throw the book across the room, because the plot twist that you thought was the most ridiculous, absurd, offensive thing yet, well, it isn't what you think it is.

      There is some cursing, underage drinking, and some violence, as well as a side plot dealing with severe mental illness (something else I was iffy on but was eventually surprised at how well it was dealt with). This is probably better for older teens, and could be a good jumping off point for some interesting moral and ethical discussions, particularly around the wars and turmoil in Somalia and the reasons why people like Farouz turn to piracy to survive.
    • 3/5
      Seventeen-year-old Amy, her father, and her stepmother becomes hostages when Somalian pirates seize their yacht, but although she builds a bond with one of her captors it becomes brutally clear that the price of life and its value are two very different things.
    • 3/5
      A little flighty and inconsistent. Had periods where you could just keep reading and reading, but other times where the story was very forgettable. I did like the empathy that the author built into the story for the Pirates of Somalia.
    • 4/5
      Hostage Three by Nick Lake grabs the reader right from the start. Somalia pirates, who had attacked and overtaken a luxury yacht, point a gun to the head of a girl as they threaten to kill her if they suspect there are any problems with their demands. The story is then told in flashback style, giving the reader the backstory of how this came about.The main character is Amy, the troubled teenage daughter of a very wealthy man. Amy, her father, stepmother and assorted crew are being held hostage and negotiations are being made to pay a multi-million dollar ransom. To keep from identifying with the hostages, they are referred to as numbers, Amy is Hostage Three. Although there is plenty of action and tension, this is also a story of Amy’s journey of self-discovery. She needs to come to terms with her less than attentive father and her mother’s suicide and learn how to move on with her life. The book also gives us some insight into how and why these pirates exist and are successful at what they do.Mostly I enjoyed the book, but I did find Amy a little to self-absorbed and whiny. The developing relationship between her and a young pirate was both uncomfortable and scary yet interesting. I have read this author before and he is very good at both story-telling and being informative. Hostage Three opened with a great hook and managed to keep me riveted throughout.