Locked Inside
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Nancy Werlin |
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| Publisher | Delacorte Bfyr |
| Honors | |
| Marnie is tremendously wealthy, and tremendously alone. The 16-year-old daughter of a superstar who was killed years ago in a plane crash, Marnie refuses to take part in her oppressive boarding-school community. She would rather burrow away in the dark, comforting world of her favorite Internet adventure game—especially now that she has started chatting online with another player, an intriguing rogue who calls himself the Elf. But closing herself off from the people around her doesn’t mean she’s safe, as Marnie soon discovers. Kidnapped, locked inside an empty… | |
Marnie is tremendously wealthy, and tremendously alone. The 16-year-old daughter of a superstar who was killed years ago in a plane crash, Marnie refuses to take part in her oppressive boarding-school community. She would rather burrow away in the dark, comforting world of her favorite Internet adventure game—especially now that she has started chatting online with another player, an intriguing rogue who calls himself the Elf.
But closing herself off from the people around her doesn’t mean she’s safe, as Marnie soon discovers. Kidnapped, locked inside an empty basement cell, Marnie is forced to confront painful truths about herself and her famous mother, as she desperately tries to escape her jailer. Oh, how little her cyber-adventure game has prepared her for this real-life dungeon! And how she longs for just one more battle of wits with her mischievous Elf!
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Sixteen-year-old Marnie Skyedottir is totally addicted to the computer game Paliopolis, where in the guise of the Sorceress Llewellyne she competes avidly with the clever but pesky Elf to escape from labyrinths and dungeons and evade the blind Rubble-Eater. Paliopolis feels safe to Marnie—not like real life, where she is flunking out at her exclusive boarding school, her famous mother Skye is dead, and her guardian Max stubbornly refuses to let her have the millions she will inherit at 21.
Skye, a mysterious former gospel singer who came from nowhere to become the beloved founder of a near-religion, has taught her daughter to fear intimacy. When the Elf, who turns out to be a senior at a nearby school, manages to figure out who Marnie really is and where she lives, she recoils. But later, when a crazed chemistry teacher acts on her delusion that she, too, is Skye’s daughter and imprisons Marnie in a cellar room, the Elf’s concern for her brings him crashing into the situation in a bungled rescue attempt. Now, locked securely away in a windowless basement, they face a very different problem from the virtual dungeons of Paliopolis. There the Sorceress and the Elf had a cloak of invisibility, truth glasses, and a spellbook to help them outwit their enemy, but here they have only a blanket, a half-empty bottle of seltzer, and a sand bucket… and the Elf has a gunshot wound in his leg.
Nancy Werlin, winner of the Edgar Award for The Killer’s Cousin, has here given her eager fans another fresh and engrossing thriller with psychological depth underlying its clever plot twists. (Ages 12 and older) —Patty Campbell
