​​I’m always intrigued by stories that involve seemingly good people who end up making really bad decisions.  What compels them to take a particular path?  How easy is it for them to push their morality and ethics aside?  The Captives piqued my interest very early on.  I was drawn into the characters’ lives and wanted to know what made them tick.

Whenever I’m reading, I like to put myself in the characters’ shoes.  As a prison psychologist, what would I do if my high school crush walked into my office as an inmate who was sentenced for murder?  After picking my jaw up off of the desk, I would like to think that I would recuse myself from being his therapist, but wouldn’t we all like to assume that we would make the best decision.  After all those years, Frank still found himself captivated by Miranda.  He was fully aware that he shouldn’t be treating Miranda, but since she didn’t seem to have any memory of Frank, he was too caught up in his own feelings to make the ethical decision.  Oh, Frank!

I enjoyed the pace of the story and how it went back and forth between the two characters.  I wanted to discover all of the details from their pasts and find out what put them in their current situations.  It was almost like watching a train wreck, I already knew that nothing good was going to come of it, and yet I couldn’t really tear myself away.  Frank and Miranda were both plagued by devastating events from their pasts.  Both of them were trying to recover, move forward, and make something positive from their experiences, however, their road to redemption was never going to be paved smoothly.

The Captives was well written and intriguing.  I found myself on pins and needles, waiting for everything to come to the pivotal, climactic peak.  When it did, I was left feeling a little disappointed.  Having enjoyed my time reading the book, the ending felt over the top and completely unbelievable to me.  I know it’s fiction, and I do go with the flow with the books that I read, but it just went a bit out of my scope of possibility.  But with that being said, I would read another book by this author.


*3.5 Stars

The Captives 
  By Debra Jo Immergut


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