Book Review: "The Bombshell" by Darrow Farr

When I heard about this book I swear I wasn't looking at the Kindle price to page ratio. Actually I was. It was 99p for over 400 pages of novel and so, I took my chances. The book's summary on Amazon didn't sound all that exciting but I think that if I didn't take up the deal then I probably would have run out of things to read. The Bombshell is basically about a seventeen-year-old entitled girl who is obsessed with celebrities, Hollywood and money who is the daughter of some pretty important people. She ends up getting kidnapped and held as a political prisoner by a group of people trying to get another political prisoner to be set free. At 25, he has a 15 year sentence.

Severine is perhaps one of those girls who you can understand why she would get kidnapped. Constantly flaunting her wealth and with a head that has more air in it than a hot air balloon - but once we start to uncover the story behind the politics of her kidnapping, this changes. Severine becomes smart - she gets into conversations with her kidnappers and asks them personal questions about their lives.

Let's also establish this - the kidnappers don't exactly treat her badly. She's allowed to wander around the house and look at the paintings, she gets to sleep when she's tired and she can have a shower every now and again. She is purely a political bargaining chip. The kidnappers understand that they cannot kill her and they definitely cannot hurt her or they will look like the bad guys and thus, never get what they want.

Severine becomes a lot more adequate to them and even though she tries to escape from their grasp at one point, she turns it around and asks to join them instead. This is backed up by the fact that they have been having her read books on Marxism and the works of other philosophers like Fanon. Willing to change to suit the group, they reluctantly agree to let Severine join them. Of course, part and parcel of this within her internal monologue is wanting to eventually escape once she has gained enough trust to do so properly. But after a phone call with her parents in which she explains that she has joined the militant group, even the reader cannot be completely sure of what Severine has planned.

After a while, we see that Severine has clearly become part of the group even though parts of her internal monologue long for home. She has these moments of clarity where she seems to know what she's doing and other moments where she isn't so sure. The writer definitely creates a three-dimensional character who actually grows her mind through her kidnapping. During this time, there are terrorist attacks such as bombings planned and of course, Severine is dressed in militant clothing and given access to weapons. She has this very Patty Hearst narrative in which she comes to adore her captors and care about them.

One thing I quite liked about this book is the way in which the writer turned the captors into the people who were the 'good guys' from time to time. There's a long discussion about how Corsica has one of the highest unemployment rates, how poor people are nearly always below the poverty line and how the cost of living is too high for the normal and average person. This is something that Severine was previously unaware of because she lived such a lavish lifestyle and yet, once she starts to read about it, she feels a pang of sympathy for these people. This is where her mind begins to turn a bit I believe. She educates herself on the books and photographs to do with the group and eventually does actually put off going home at all.

All in all, as the book unfolds, other weird things happen concerning Severine especially when the police get involved. The writer has definitely based this off the Patty Hearst case. It is a brilliantly wild book which definitely looks at the way in which someone young may see revolutionaries as these great philosophical souls - but people eventually have to grow up some time. That's the hard part.