'A singing-club trip ends in disaster when the coach carrying the members spins out of control and ends up perilously balanced on the edge of a cliff. Hailey is trapped at the back of the coach with her nemesis Bex, who's taken the lead role in their latest performance, and hadsome Kit, on whom Hailey has a massive crush. The three of them must work together in order to escape the coach before it falls. Will they be able to set aside their differences and find a way to survive?'
Trapped tells the story of a group of teens who find their lives quite literally hanging in the balance when an accident leave their coach over the edge off a cliff. However, despite the peril and drama that comes from this, the book failed to connect with me.
The story begins by introducing us to our three main characters, Hailey, Bex, and Kit, as they're leaving a retirement home after putting on a singing performance for the residents. Hailey is our lead, and we get the story from her point of view, and she spends the first several pages filling the reader in on how much she dislikes Bex, the popular new singer who recently joined the Hightop Youth Singers group. Not only has Bex been given the lead parts, not only does she have praise and love heaped on her, but she's also grabbed the attention of Kit, who just a few weeks before was giving all of his attention to Hailey.
As the group leaves their preformance, climbing into an old coach in the middle of a storm, the three of them find themselves sitting at the back of the bus. However, when a tree comes down in the storm, landing on the roof of the coach just in front of the three of them, it traps them at the back. Worse still, the impact sends the coach sliding over the edge of the cliff they're driving along, leaving the three teens hanging over a deadly drop. Now the three of them will have to figure out a way to get out of the coach before it goes over the edge, taking them with it.
Trapped isn't a bad story by any means, and I don't want to come across as too harsh towards it, but the main reason that I didn't really enjoy this book is that it felt like only half a story. At the begining of the book we're told how Bex joined the club a few weeks ago and how Hailey sees her as trying to ruin things for her. There's a lot of drama here, stuff that informs a lot of the book and the way that the two characters interact; but I can't help but feel like perhaps the book would have worked better if we'd have gotten to see this. The entire events of the book feels like the final act of a longer story, one where we get to see the backstory, where we're allowed to see Hailey's animosity building. As it is, she just feels petty and weird as we don't understand where she's coming from.
It also means that the emotional resolution doesn't really hit as hard. The girls manage to get to freedom and save themselves, and some truths come out that seem to be laying the seeds for a friendship between the two of them; but because we'd had no real time to experience the way things were before this this resolution fell flat for me. The fact that the book is almost all focused on the events of the crash and the fight to survive, and that we didn't really spend a huge amount of time with the characters before it happened doesn't help you get sucked into the narrative.
The book includes illustrations by Melania Badosa, who also provided the cover art for the book. The illustrations are pretty simple and easy to understand, and Badosa does a great job at putting a lot of expression and emotions into the characters, and you can easily see what people are thinking just by looking at their faces. Hailey makes it clear how she feels just by the way she looks at Bex, and you can really feel the anger and resentment pouring off her face. The artwork also feels a lot more mature than some of the other books that Barrington Stoke have on offer, and suits the age of the reader for this story well. The book is clearly designed for teens, and the art style really seems to reflect that.
Overall, this wasn't really a bad read, and I'm sure that there will be young readers who will enjoy it; but it did feel very rushed, with characters and a story that failed to draw me in. I'm sure that there is an audience for this book out there who will love it though.
No comments:
Post a Comment