Modern-Day Epistolary Novel
An epistolary novel is a big, fancy name for a work of fiction told in letters. While the form was frequently used in the 18th and 19th centuries in works like Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, letter-based novels as a genre kept on chugging right into the 20th century and remain a popular format today. The Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, and Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower are just a few examples of modern classics that employ this style.
But enough with the history lesson. Just like these great authors before her, Lucy Christopher takes the novel-in-letters format and puts it to work—with a twist.
For one thing, Stolen is not made up of a series of letters but is rather one gigantic letter broken up into 113 sections. As a result, the presentation of Gemma's ordeal mimics the relentlessness of the actual events—we wait and wait and wait for a chapter break so we can grab a Coke or go pee, but the story just goes on and on. And on. Paging through the paragraphs of text and finding little to no white space kind of gives us an idea of how Gemma must feel looking out from the tree in the Separates: "horizon, horizon, Separates, horizon, horizon … nowhere to run" (30.6). We are trapped in the flow of the story the way she's trapped in the middle of the desert.