Hunted Book review By: Jordyn Randall

Benchmark on book Review: 

Movie: https://vimeo.com/77799822 

You would think having telepathy would be great, but what if it put your life in danger?

“Hunted” by Cheryl Rainfield, is a thriller suspense book intended for a teen audience. The book is about a teenage girl named Caitlyn who is  telepathic and lives in a world where having any paranormal powers is illegal. Caitlyn is on the run with her mom away from the government troopers,who are people without paranormal powers who are called normals,they enslave, torture and kill Paranormals. Caitlyn and her mom stop in a city to settle for a while. Her mom finds a job and she attends a regular high school to blend in with the normals. She became friends with two normals named Rachel and Alex. She begins to  fall for Alex. Caitlyn is very scared to become closer to him because of how dangerous it would be if he turned her in. She begins to realize that  there are Paranormals that want to destroy all the Normals, the exact same way the Normals are trying to destroy all the Paranormals. Caitlyn has to decide if she wants to stay in hiding to protect her mom and herself, or take a stand to try and save the world.

The author of “Hunted”, Cheryl Rainfield is a canadian author who has written many books like “Scars” and “Stained”. Cheryl Rainfield has been abused, raped, bullied, tortured, has had her life threatened repeatedly, and has been mistreated because she is queer. “I’ve seen what people are like when they let hate twist them. And I know what it’s like to be in so much pain and feel so alone in that pain that I want to die. I want to lessen that pain for others if I can. And I want to increase compassion. I think the best way of doing this is through books.” Cheryl says that books help us get inside another person’s soul, thoughts and emotions and helps us understand another person and we begin to have more empathy and kindness not just for ourselves but for others also.  We begin to realize their’s more to why a person acts the way they do. 

To write Hunted she thought back on to some of her abuse experiences. Just like the main character Caitlyn, Cheryl knows what it’s like to have her life threatened, to be tortured, and having to decide whether to hide her true self or to be herself even if it means putting herself in danger. Cheryl says a lot of people can relate this book because many people struggle to be who they are because they are scared society will not accept them. Cheryl also had a strong love for fantasy, and she read a lot of books growing up. Fantasy helped her escape from the real world. Cheryl wished that she had telepathic so she could know what her abusers were going to do to her before they did them. Another thing that inspired hunted is the cruelty in the world with sexism, racism and homophobia. Cheryl tried to put a correlation of those types of things in all her books. 

I like Hunted because it was based in another world with different ruled and laws but still somehow related to the real world. It makes me mad and sad that people feel that they have to hide themselves to protect themselves because they’re scared of what people would think of them or what they would do to them. The same way Caitlyn has to hide herself from the Paratroopers. The book made me think about how cruel people in the world are. I agree with Cheryl and Caitlyn, I just want their to be more kindness in the world, so people can understand peoples situations. 

Bibliography:

Rainfield, Cheryl. "Cheryl Rainfield: Teen Fiction Author, Reviewer, and Book-a-Holic."Cheryl Rainfield: Teen Fiction Author, Reviewer, and Book-a-Holic. Cheryl Rainfield, n.d. Web. 25 Oct. 2013.

http://www.cherylrainfield.com/

"Cheryl Rainfield." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Oct. 2013. Web. 25 Oct. 2013.