Unstolen by Wendy Jean

The story of a girl whose brother was kidnapped when she was an infant and never found. A very well-written book, I think, and hard to read, mostly because (should get this out up front) I hated the mother.

Not that I didn't sympathize with her - to lose a child, the uncertainty, the unfairness. Or I could have sympathized, perhaps was meant to. But I identified too strongly with the daughter, who did sympathize, too much I thought. I wanted her to stand up and demand that her mother look away from the stolen son, and see her, or to do that on her behalf, or something.

Monstrous characters are interesting. The mother was warped, understandably so. Had survived, was doing her best. It was perhaps her inability to stop hoping - to give up on her son - that made her most unendurable, in the end. A good trait... until it isn't. Until it becomes a rigid refusal to live. Buying new shoes for the absent son, that she couldn't afford for her daughter...

Whatever warped her, whatever made her, she was, to me, an unsympathetic character, a monster.