ReView: Stolen by Elizabeth GIlpin

 “This has to be my low point. No way it gets worse than this.”

When we first meet Elizabeth Gilpin in her candid, raw and resilient memoir Stolen, she is a young girl, with parents who don’t know what to do with her intense emotions and occasional bad habits.  After verbal chastising and grounding don’t seem to work, they resort to something much more dramatic: having her kidnapped and forced to live in the woods with other troubled teens.

Forced to starve and subjected to intense physical labor as therapy, it’s at this point that Elizabeth thinks her low point has come. But little did she know this was the first step in a traumatizing and tumultuous experience that will literally test her will to live. What follows is a story of survival; choosing to survive in spite of everything. Through verbal and physical abuse, through humiliation and deprivation, Gilpin does the impossible: she survives.

Gilpin’s voice is fierce and impassioned throughout. Even when she is at her lowest, there is a ferocity inside her that is palpable through the page. The way she is able to look back now on the experiences that could’ve left her with nothing, is inspiring and mature (especially considering the lack of tools she was given to cope). She has an uncanny ability to look back at these experiences and recognize and acknowledge how they shaped some of the trauma she is still dealing with today. 

This book opened my eyes to an industry that is essentially manipulating troubled teenagers and their families, even benefiting from their struggles. And it serves as a crucial discussion for teenagers and their parents on the right and wrong ways of supporting mental health in children and young adults.

*There are themes that may be intense based on your own personal experience. While I recommend this important story, please consider as you consider reading*