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{"id":2122,"date":"2013-10-02T12:02:33","date_gmt":"2013-10-02T17:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/happycatholicbookshelf\/?p=2122"},"modified":"2013-10-02T12:02:33","modified_gmt":"2013-10-02T17:02:33","slug":"the-chinese-chest-ya-suspense-wo-the-usual-ya-garbage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/happycatholicbookshelf\/2013\/10\/the-chinese-chest-ya-suspense-wo-the-usual-ya-garbage\/","title":{"rendered":"The Chinese Chest: YA Suspense w\/o the Usual YA Garbage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"\"$ <\/p>\n

Last spring at the SC Book Festival, a local romance novelist waved me into her booth, and tried to sell me on her latest book.\u00a0 Not my genre, but I played along.\u00a0 \u201cIf this were a movie, what would it be rated?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

She gave me the naughty-and-proud-of-it smile and declared, \u201cX!\u201d<\/p>\n

No thanks.\u00a0 I kept walking.<\/p>\n

At the next booth I met Theresa Jenner Garrido<\/a>.\u00a0 She was promoting her favorite of her novels, The Chinese Chest<\/a>, and I put the same question to her.\u00a0 She hesitated. \u201cWell, it does have a theme of\u00a0 human trafficking . . .\u201d She wasn\u2019t quite getting my question. I told her what had happened at the previous booth.\u00a0 She lit up.\u00a0 \u201cOh! No.\u00a0 Nothing like that.\u00a0 Absolutely not.\u00a0 I\u2019m a retired middle school teacher, and I got into writing fiction because I was sick of the trash they were pushing on the kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

I gambled on a copy, and it paid off.<\/p>\n

What you get:<\/strong> Lisa the babysitter takes a job with the creepy strangers on the edge of town.\u00a0 The kid is weird.\u00a0 There\u2019s a room you\u2019re not supposed to go into.\u00a0 True to genre, you want to shout \u201cNo! Don\u2019t go in there!\u201d at every turn.\u00a0 The suspense keeps ramping, the bad guys turn out to be very, very bad.\u00a0 Themes of murder, kidnapping, human trafficking.\u00a0 Sexual exploitation is alluded to, but with deft discretion \u2014 not a single explicit mention.<\/p>\n

The prose is quick and clean \u2014 in all very well told.\u00a0 (I did find the denouement a little clunky, but I can see why she staged it as she did.) It\u2019s written for an easy adaptation to film \u2014 small cast, limited sets, and the script just hangs off the page.\u00a0 I\u2019d love to see this picked up and turned into a movie, even though I\u2019d be too scared to watch it. If you\u2019re a wimp like me, you may need to skim a few of the creepiest paragraphs.<\/p>\n

Why you should read this with your daughter:<\/strong> Because kids don\u2019t know what \u201cBe careful!\u201d means unless you teach them.\u00a0 At every turn, Lisa ignores the red flags going off in her head \u2014 just as people tend to do in real life.\u00a0 There are classic warning signs of sexual predators and other criminal types, missed opportunities to get help before things escalate, and the internal pressure to take a calculated risk because the deal is just too good.\u00a0 At the climax, Lisa does what needs to be done, and does it brilliantly (with a few more No! No! moments tossed in to keep things moving).<\/p>\n

Bonus:<\/strong> Lisa\u2019s friends and family are pulled together decent people with no bizarre obsessions or dysfunctions.\u00a0 The boyfriend is the kinda guy you want your daughter to date.\u00a0 Lisa even mostly does her homework on time. Score.<\/p>\n

Great story.\u00a0 Well worth the investment.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"