THE DETOUR

Seventeen-year-old Livvy Flynn isn’t your average teenager: she is a New York Times bestselling author with a movie deal, a dinner date with Steven Spielberg, and serious money in the bank.

Instead of spending her weekends at high school football games or sleeping over at friends’ houses, Livvy goes on book tours and speaks at writing conferences. Being the young envy of writers everywhere suits Livvy just fine, until one fateful trip to a writing retreat gets derailed. Livvy wakes up after wrecking her car to discover she’s a prisoner, hurt and trapped in a basement in the middle of nowhere, held by a crazy woman and her even crazier daughter. The two seem hellbent on making Livvy pay for an injustice she has no memory of committing, and they have no intention of letting her go until she figures it out. Even Livvy admits that her situation is more than a little reminiscent of Stephen King’s Misery. The difference is that Livvy is so frustratingly dim and full of herself that she’s difficult to root for. Even a confession about the pain of past bullying isn’t enough to sustain readers’ sympathy. While nobody should endure that kind of physical harm, Livvy’s “the universe owes me” attitude is likely to turn off even the most otherwise simpatico teen writers-to-be.

Stay on the main roads instead of taking this detour.