Review - Don't Breathe A Word by Holly Cupala

Don't Breathe A Word by Holly Cupala
January 3rd, 2012 by HarperTeen

We meet Joy as she is staging her own kidnapping. She dyes and cuts her hair and sets the room up just perfectly so no one will know she left her life voluntarily. Joy doesn't want to be followed, to be found. We don't exactly know what Joy is running away from, but then we are introduced to her controlling boyfriend, Asher, through snippets and flashbacks. Joy feels the only way to leave Asher is to leave her entire life. After all, he controls it all. She hits the Seattle streets in attempt to find the one person that offered his help. The one person who saw right through her suffocating life.

The first few chapters of this book will leave you breathless as we jump from just a few days before she runs away to events to the present. Joy vaguely describes how her boyfriend Asher punished her after a quick trip to go visit her brother. Yes, punished... Those beginning scenes hooked me to the story and not only did I want to see what Joy was running away from, I wanted to know how she was punished. Throughout the book as she lives on the dirty, grimy streets of Seattle, we learn how Asher's control turns to abuse and how that changes everything. Changes a normal high school girl named Joy into an eating out of trash bins girl named Triste.