'The Return of Ellie Black' questions society's fixation on the victim stereotype

This is the KUOW Book Club, and we just read through the first half of Emiko Jean's thriller "The Return of Ellie Black." I'm your guide Katie Campbell. Let's get into it.

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ean's novel could easily be taken for a standard — albeit very good — mystery-thriller. It has the classic elements: a girl disappeared, a detective haunted by her past, a deeply creepy "family" of captors in the woods.

But to look at "The Return of Ellie Black" as standard thriller fare would be to miss the systemic crime Jean is piecing together: the prioritization of some victims over others.

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As far as I can tell — and someone, please, correct me if I'm wrong — we don't have a physical description of the titular character, Elizabeth "Ellie" Black, at this point. We do have hints, though, that she is not the kind of conventionally attractive, well-liked, well-off, white girl that crime dramas and news stories often center, even fixate on.

To recap: Ellie had been missing for a little over two years when she is found on a trail, rail-thin and clearly abused. She seems to have somehow escaped her captors, of which there are at least three, as far as we know at the halfway mark. And through Ellie's chapters, we learn she was kept with at least two other teenage girls. Detective Chelsey Calhoun was in charge of Ellie's case when she first went missing, and she doggedly picks it back up when Ellie returns. Detective Calhoun quickly learns that Ellie was not the only victim and is intent on finding out who took the girls. As far as the reader knows at this point, Ellie's captors and abusers are still out there. There may be other victims.

And while there are differences in the girls taken by this perverse "family," there's a key similarity that their abductors take advantage of: that the world around them is willing to write them off.

David is the foul patriarch of the trio holding the girls. He seems to have convinced himself that he has saved them (there are deeply religious extremist vibes) and they owe him thanks, even as he abuses them. He renames them, even, and declares them sisters. I get the feeling he will regret the latter eventually.

And while it seems David has gotten away with this for a time — we learn there were at least five girls before Ellie — he has not anticipated Detective Calhoun.

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Calhoun is a unique foil for Ellie. So is Calhoun's sister, Lydia, who was killed by a boyfriend when they were teenagers. Like Ellie, Lydia disappeared after sneaking out one night. Unlike Ellie, we learn from her boyfriend Danny, Lydia's family had the means to look for her and a father who was police chief at the time. They found her when it was already too late, but at least they found her.

We get a look at this dynamic when Calhoun goes to talk to Danny after Ellie has been found. Danny confronts the detective about the disparity between her sister and Ellie.

Jean really couldn't be more clear about her criticism of our culture here. It's not exactly new, but it's poignant in the way she pulls it off, especially with so much about Ellie left to the imagination. It's like Jean is daring you to picture a stereotype; whether that's of the girl you expect to see on news reports or the girl who is ignored, that's up to you, reader. Contemplate at your own risk.

Here's another key difference between Ellie and Lydia, though: Ellie is alive. She has survived one ordeal. Now, she is living another, the ordeal that is survival.

The "Hope" quoted above was one of the other girls Ellie was with. Her real name was Gabrielle, and Ellie was found wearing her sweatshirt. Gabrielle was found dead long before that. We learn they were fighting for each other, in their own way, eating Queen Anne's lace to keep them from getting pregnant by David.

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That's another thing David seems to have misjudged, the sheer force of will of girls who are tired of being tossed aside and beaten down.

In her current state, Ellie is blaming herself for what happened to her, imagining that she wanted too much and made herself vulnerable by wanting. But there's a line early on that I think frames her wanting in a more powerful way:

Clearly, Ellie wanted to be free. Whatever happened, however she did it, she is free now.

We'll just have to keep reading to learn how she did it — and where she goes from here.

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Spoiler alert: For those of you who like to plan ahead, I'm happy to share I've picked what we'll be reading in June, too — and it's a two-fer!

We're celebrating Pride Month with Corinne Manning's "We Had No Rules" and Ijeoma Oluo's "Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World — And How You Can, Too."

"Be A Revolution" is the fresh new book from Oluo, the Seattle author who wrote the #1 New York Times bestseller "So You Want To Talk About Race." Oluo continues her critical work with "Be A Revolution," which aims to educate and inspire readers to create positive change in the systems around them. As HarperCollins puts it, "Oluo wishes to take our conversations on race and racism out of a place of pure pain and trauma, and into a place of loving action." That just feels right for Pride.

And we're pairing it with a short story collection that explores queerness in contemporary life. In "We Had No Rules," Manning centers characters faced with a choice: assimilate or rebel. The stories remind us that no two people's experiences are the same, and that there's something powerful in that. Paul Lisicky, author of "Later" and "The Narrow Door" described it this way: "Expansive, soulful, vulnerable, sexy, funny, and broken, 'We Had No Rules' is queer all the way down to its bones."