Movie Fail. Reading Win!

Ever start watching a movie, only to find out it is not the movie you were expecting? At all? That just happened to us. Nate was very excited to bring home "Chronicle" from Blockbuster. What he thought he had in hand was the movie starring Milla Jovovich, Justin Long, Vincent D'Onofrio and several other well-known actors. (As it turns out, that movie has not been released yet.) What we ended up with is a movie, also entitled "Chronicle," starring three actors I have never heard of before, and with good reason.

Captain Picard is not amused

Plot synopsis: three teenage idiots, feeling alienated from their fellow teenage idiots, wander away from a party and into a cave where they find a large collection of mysterious glowing crystals. After being exposed to the crystals, they develop some manner of telekinesis, which they use in the ways you would expect stupid teenage boys to do. Oh, and by the way, it is filmed Cloverfield style by one of the aforementioned idiots. When will movie-makers stop using this horrible schtick? Interspersed between flying football and hurling things at one another, they have very believable conversations about Tibetan Buddhism and Arthur Schopenhauer, I suppose to establish how unique and intellectual they are. One of them causes a car accident, after which point I stopped paying attention. Disappointing? Yes.

On the up side, I finished another book this morning. So the day is not a complete loss. I downloaded Cemetery Girl (written by David Bell, narrated by Fred Lehne,) a short while back when it was on sale on Audible. The synopsis sounded intriguing, and, although I don't usually listen to shorter audiobooks (9 hours), I do enjoy a good crime novel here and there. I finished the book in three days and enjoyed the unusual spin the author put on a fairly popular crime fiction theme, child abduction.

For many people, the worst nightmare imaginable would be for a loved one to be taken away. Bell's novel poses a disturbing central question: is it worse to lose someone, or to have them return as a different person?

The story begins four years after the disappearance of Caitlin Stuart. Police efforts have long since grown half-hearted, media coverage has all but dissolved, Caitlin has basically become a ghost story to everyone except her father, Tom. Even her mother, Abby has decided to move on, organizing a memorial service with her church against Tom's wishes, and asking for a divorce. Tom is driven by a need to know what happened, to the point where people around him are insisting he should go to therapy.

Things begin to get complicated when a 20 year old drug addict comes forward, claiming to have seen Caitlin recently, engaged in untoward activity with a much older man. No one but Tom believes her story at first; that is, until a bedraggled 16 year old girl is found wandering near the shopping mall, is identified as Caitlin and is reunited with her parents. Everyone expects this to be the beginning of a healing process, the joyous reunion of a lost child and her heartbroken parents.

But, what if the child you once knew spent four formative years of their adolescence under the control of another person? Would you still know her? The rest of the world sees Caitlin as a victim of kidnapping and sexual abuse. After years of brainwashing and manipulation, Caitlin sees herself as a grown woman, the lover and partner of her captor. What if that child now saw you as holding her against her will, and expressed with every fiber of her being the desire to return to the man that took her away? Would that be even harder to handle than her original absence?

In a way, Caitlin is still missing. The girl living in Tom and Abby's house shows them nothing but defiance and disdain; she refuses to answer questions, spews insults and profanity, taunts her parents and the police, and tries to run away, insisting that she loves John, her captor, and that she wants to be with him. The memories and hopes that her parents clung to are shattered. Still, Tom will not give up. He is willing to try anything to get through and find out what happened to his daughter in the preceding four years. Anything.

I won't get into the rest of the story, so as not to ruin the plot, but the twists and turns keep your emotions on the edge. The book moves along at a quick pace, but forces the reader to wrestle with some truly difficult questions. If you're up for a crime thriller with a different psychological twist, I would recommend this book. It will definitely make you look differently at the people in your life and what they mean to you.