Three Days - Hardcover

Donna Jo Napoli is the author of many books for children and young adults includingThe Magic Circle, Zel, and Stones in Water. She has won numerous awards, including the Golden Kite Award and the Sydney Taylor Award for Stones in Water. She lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Gr 4-6-Eleven-year-old Jackie accompanies her father on a business trip to Italy. While driving to their hotel after dinner, he suffers an apparent heart attack but manages to pull over before dying. Nightmarish scenes follow when she is unable to get any help from passing motorists. Finally, a man and his grown son, Francesco, stop and take Jackie to the remote countryside hours away, where they live and force her to stay. Three days pass during which readers experience Jackie's fear, resourcefulness, courage, gradual acceptance of her father's death, and confusion over her fond feelings toward Francesco's sympathetic sister, Claudia. Ultimately, the woman helps Jackie escape by putting her on a train back to her mother. Safety tips are seamlessly incorporated into this action-packed book. Readers will admire Jackie's survival sense. She is observant, analytical, always looking for a way out of this frightening situation. Since her Italian captors speak no English, the first-person, nearly dialogue-free narration makes Jackie's isolation and confusion more immediate. Characterization is more complex than in most kidnapping tales, with the Italian family taking these drastic actions because they are dealing in an irrational way with the recent death of Claudia's daughter. Pair this story with James Duffy's Missing (Scribner's, 1988; o.p.) and Willo Davis Roberts's Hostage (Atheneum, 2000) for a suspenseful reading experience.

B. Allison Gray, South Country Library, Bellport, NY

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