Hostage Three by Nick Lake is the oldest book on my Netgalley queue. So old that I was like meh to reading the eARC and ended up just getting a physical copy of the book out of the library. A whole lot of time and change has happened between when this book first came out and now. And well, I think that the world is different and we just think differently about certain things.

So, I had read In Darkness when it won the Printz Award a while ago and found it interesting. Thus, when I saw Hostage Three coming out, my interest was piqued but apparently not enough to actually pick the book up until 2019 when I decided to challenge myself to get through as many of my Netgalley outstanding books as I could this year. I don’t know how well this book really holds up. My instinct says it doesn’t hold up super great. I mean, this book is told from the perspective of a white girl who is on a yacht which gets captured by Somali pirates, written by a white man. There’s a whole lot of privilege to unpack here. Plus, I don’t really know who is the right person to tell this story.

As for the plot, Hostage Three is told from the perspective of Amy Fields, a girl who is known on the yacht as hostage three – her father and stepmother are hostage one and hostage two. They are given these aliases by the pirates to make them easier to kill, should it come down to that. So, we read about the time before the yacht when Amy is making bad life choices – resulting out of the trauma of her losing her mother. Then we get into the section of her dad randomly deciding to buy a yacht and sail the world and drag Amy along for the trip. Then, of course, the yacht is taken over by Somali pirates and Amy falls for one of them, Faroud. It could be Stockholm syndrome, it could be actual love.

I will say this book doesn’t really have chapters in the traditional sense which drove me batty. It also doesn’t have dialogue marked with quotation marks and traditional dialogue markers. I felt like this was a little bit pretentious for me. It took a long time to get through and never really made me feel fully invested. But, on the upside, we did get a variety of perspectives and got to see why the pirates took the ship and why colonization sucks. I think there is a lot to discuss with Hostage Three but I absolutely do not see myself revisiting this book. There’s an audience – people who are erudite and think deeply about issues.

I've come to learn that Nick Lake writes a very specific book for a very specific reader. You either end up loving or hating his books. This one just didn't work for me. Amy is too stupid to live, and this Farouz is evil no matter how hard he tries to justify his actions and those of his pirate gang. The insta-love bothers me, and I feel it teaches readers the wrong lesson about the kinds of people that are worth loving. I don't know. It was a bit of a train wreck for me.

This isn't my normal kind of book, but it was amazing. This is a book I wish I'd written. It's powerful and gripping and emotional, and I couldn't stop reading. I was fascinated by these Somali pirates and the lives they had been coerced into because of circumstances. This is definitely a book I would recommend! One of my favourites of 2014 for sure.