Review: Light of Day by Allison van Diepen
Light of Day by Allison van Diepen Series: Stand-Alone
Published by HarperTeen on November 24th 2015
Genres: Young Adult Contemporary
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
Source: Publisher
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I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Like any other Saturday night, Gabby Perez and her best friend, Maria, are out dancing. But this isn’t just another night. When a mysterious stranger warns Gabby their drinks have been drugged, she hurries Maria home. Sure enough, the next day, Maria can’t remember a thing. Gabby’s shaken by their close call. And she’s not going to stay quiet about it.
She opens up the airwaves on her radio show and discovers an even worse truth: the guy who drugged them was going to force them into prostitution. Then Gabby’s friend Bree never makes it home from a party, and Gabby fears the worst.
Gabby reaches out to the guy who saved her, the gorgeous stranger she knows only as X. As they dive into the seedy underworld of Miami, searching for Bree, they can’t ignore their undeniable attraction. Until Gabby discovers the truth about who X really is and the danger that surrounds him. Can their love survive the light of day?
This was an interesting story and an interesting concept. It basically follows Gabby an aspiring DJ, who is saved from being drugged at the club by a mysterious handsome stranger named ‘X’ and somehow gets tangled up into a darker world of girls getting kidnapped, pimps and sex trafficking.
The story was a quick read for me. I think in a way the author was trying to spread awareness about this issue that’s so big in this world right now, I just felt as far as the story went, it was a bit unrealistic. Entertaining, but unrealistic.
For me, all the steps that Gabby took felt dangerous and if this was taken by a girl her age in the real world, the girl would be long dead and probably would have hurt a lot of girls in the process for being so reckless. As nice and cleaned up the ending came out, there aren’t a lot of happy endings for a lot of the girls going through this.
In the book, Gabby was trying to find and rescue a girl from her school named Bree, so she uses the radio to spread awareness and is forward about the pimps and actually mentions the name once or twice. Somehow everything works out for Gabby, no one she cares about get’s hurt, only the bad guys. Unfortunately, this is not how it works. If anyone did what Gabby had done, it would never turn out the way it did.
Are there people out there like ‘X’ looking and rescuing the girls that are kidnapped and forced into the sex trade? I don’t know. I did not do a lot of research on that. I do know that sex trafficking numbers are high, that most of these girls never get a happy ending because they are never found, and if someone in real life announced the pimp’s name on the radio - the pimp would probably have disappeared into the night with these girls.
In truth the statistics are real and frightening. I wish the story was handled better, but nonetheless, it was entertaining and I am sort of glad that someone took a bold step to write about this. I just wish the actions of the main character wasn’t so reckless, uninformed and dangerous. Even the messy situation that she gets herself into in the end, she somehow comes out unscratched.
I gave the author 3 brownie points for at least trying.
The Statistics behind sex trafficking from http://www.equalitynow.org:
- At least 20.9 million adults and children are bought and sold worldwide into commercial sexual servitude, forced labor and bonded labor.2
- About 2 million children are exploited every year in the global commercial sex trade.3
- Almost 6 in 10 identified trafficking survivors were trafficked for sexual exploitation.4
- Women and girls make up 98% of victims of trafficking for sexual exploitation.5
