Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9780330337168
Format: Import
ISBN number: 0330337165
Label: Macmillan and Co, Limited
Manufacturer: Macmillan and Co, Limited
Page Count: 176
Printing Date: 1996
Publishing house: Macmillan and Co, Limited
Studio: Macmillan and Co, Limited
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Rated by buyers -
Ransom is a book about 5 teens in High School who get kidnapped. The tennagers, Bruce, Glenn, Marianne, Dexter, and Jesse have rich families or so the kidnappers think. When the teens get on the bus, they realize they have a sub bus driver. The driver doesn't know the routes, so Bruce sits in the front and tells the driver where to go. After all the kids are dropped off, the driver ignores the 5 teens left. This when they realize that they are being kidnapped. The kidnappers take the teens to the Rocky Mountains to hide. What happens subsequent is mind-blowing.
I enjoyed this book. I think anyone who like mysteries or suspenceful books would enjoy this book. I liked how Lois Duncan described the characters. What I didn't like was how Lois kept swiching point of views. I think that this book should be read by every middle school and high school student.
Rated by buyers -
This will be a mini-review, instead of a full one, since the book in question is less than 150 pages long and told in the omniscient viewpoint, so character complexity is minimal. Lois Duncan was rather the R.L. Stine of the X generation, except that she wrote for a slightly older audience and was more psychologically creepy than blood-and-gore. Her stories weren't the type made for around-the-campfire telling; they'd take too long to explain in full. I remember reading and enjoying this one, Ransom, and especially Locked in Time as a teen.
The story's premise is fairly basic: five teenagers are kidnapped by their substitute bus driver on the way home from school. He and two accomplices have planned out the kidnapping, selecting a route that terminates in Valley Gardens, a rich neighborhood, for maximum financial benefit. They take the kids high up in the New Mexico mountains where the cold and altitude make escape very unlikely and wait for the money to roll in. Unfortunately, the kidnappers only minimally examined their would-be profit makers. Of the five kids - Marianne, Glenn, Bruce, Dexter, and Jesse - only two families have any real money or acess to it. Brothers Glenn and Bruce's parents have it, but Jesse's parents are only renting/housesitting in the glitzy neighborhood, and Dexter is an orphan temporarily lodging with his uncle. Popular Marianne's family looks like it has more money than it does. Her mother got the house in the divorce, but her new stepfather's income is paltry. Which leaves a lot up in the air. The kidnappers are capable of plenty, and if their demands aren't met, it's entirely possible, they'll cut their losses - literally - and run rather than bargain down.
Written in 1966, this book has the spare prose of an earlier era. In some indefinable way it reminded me of Mary Stewart's writing. Perhaps it's because Duncan describes a gentler, less complex era, an era in which kidnapping children is shocking, and murder is shock inducing. 1966, after all, is only a few years after the events of In Cold Blood, a crime which left Kansas speechless with horror. A Columbine or Virginia Tech mass murder was behind the scope of imagination. These kids still believe in the innate goodness of humanity. They are also a bit more polite and respectful than kids are these days. That and a little dated slang keeps this book from being quite timeless.
Duncan uses the omniscient point of view which allows her to impart a great deal of information about these kids, their parents, and the kidnappers, but this device allows for little mystery. It's all just out there; the reader knows what's going on in everyone's head at all times. Still, since the reader doesn't know how these characters will all interplay with each other, there is a level of suspense here that Duncan adroitly builds to a climax. And in the meantime she creates a portrait of a teen sociopath who is perhaps more chilling a character than any of the kidnappers are.
Ultimately, this is a fast and fairly enjoyable read. For the most part it holds up, even after all of these years. My grade: a B-.
Rated by buyers -
Ransom, by Lois Duncan, is a very good book. It is a realistic fiction book.
In Ransom five kids from a rich neighborhood are kidnapped and kept for ransom, but only a few families are able to stretch their money and use it for the ransom. This book is about what the kids, and parents, go through when the kids are kidnapped.
Ransom was a very good book and keeps you interested throughout the whole entire book. If you like exciting and exhilarating books you will love this one.
Rated by buyers 
-
This was an outstanding book about
the triumph of five kids as they fight for their
life in Ransom.
This book is about a group of students
from a wealthy part of town. On the bus they
realize theirs a new bus driver, whatever the
old one must be sick. But when the bus driver
kidnaps them and brings them to a kind of
hunting post in the middle of nowhere.
The kidnapper asks for an impossible ransom,
the kids need to get away. They know their parents
just won't come through.
This book is for readers who like books
that everything is weird until the last page where
it wraps up. It had a lot of switching but besides
that it's pretty easy to read.
Rated by buyers -
The book ransom is a very good book. It has kept me interested through the last word. The moral behind the story was great; the grass is not always greener on the other side. The moral is a common one, but in this story you see it in a different way.
The kidnappers plan the whole thing out. They would kidnap the kids that lived in valley gardens, a place thought to be all rich people. The kids are riding the bus home from school unexpectedly as they do every day, then all of the sudden they go past their drop off spot. They go farther and farther until they have no idea where they are.
Five kids are kidnapped as each of their families are forced to pay a very large ransom. What the kidnappers don't know is that the ransom is as hard for them to find as it would be for anyone else.
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