When Amanda Lindhout was a child, she lived inside National Geographic. The faraway flora and fauna would swallow her, while the real world--an abusive, impoverished home in small-town Canada--would fall quietly away. Though Lindhout would eventually convert these fantasies to reality, it is the powerful use of imagination, honed in youth, that would save her life and inspire the title of her memoir, A House in the Sky.
Lindhout's childhood escapism is reminiscent of A Little Princess or Bridge to Terabithia, but her adult life is shaped more by intellectual curiosity and a desire to impact the world. Saving up money from waitressing, she traverses the globe until 2008, when she attempts her most dangerous feat--going to Somalia to cover the civil war. Though warned repeatedly of the danger, she proceeds with a brazen defiance that tempts the reader toward judgment. Yet in this defiance is an enviable daring, as though her fear of stagnation usurps all other fears--the prospect of futility looming darker than danger or death.
When Lindhout is abducted and held hostage for over a year, her life comes full circle. Thrown back into a captive and harrowing existence, she must, as she did at home, invent a place to retreat psychologically when actual escape is not an option.
Despite anticipating her capture from the introduction, the narrative remains somehow suspenseful. Humble, brave and naïvely optimistic, Lindhout possesses the elements of a classically compelling hero. --Annie Atherton