Hidden

Bibliography
Frost, H. (2011). Hidden. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. ISBN: 9780374382216

Plot Summary
When they were eight years old, Wren and Darra both experienced a traumatic event that shaped the next six years of their lives. Wren was accidentally kidnapped in a robbery gone wrong. Darra? Her father was the accidental kidnapper.

Six years later, the two girls meet again in a chance encounter at Camp Oakwood. The try to keep their separate ways but are forced together during different camp activities. The two will have to confront the past to move on to the future.

Critical Analysis
The cover of this novel in verse is hauntingly beautiful. After having read the novel, it would appear that Darra is the girl on the left. The last six years have left her bitter and angry, and she doesn’t want to go to some random camp. The darkness suits her character in the second part of the book. Wren has been reunited with her family. She is friends with the “popular” crowd at Camp Oakwood. It seems as though life has leveled out for her. The fiery reds and lighter skin tone seem to reflect a person who may not be at peace with life, but who is getting there. But as you read Slideshow of Memories, you learn that it is actually flipped.

The first part of the book is split into chapters that contain short stanzas. It is told from eight-year-old Wren’s point of view in the back seat of the car. Many of Wren’s short thoughts that may pop into her head are enclosed within parentheses. This helps create a sense of urgency in some of the scenes, like when she is trying to figure out who the man, woman and little girl are.

The second part of the book is Darra’s point of view six years after Wren escapes. These poems are split by titles. They are longer poems. The pages almost look like that of a regular novel. This could be to represent Darra’s anger and how she is still trying to process her father being locked away for the past six years. She is surprisingly a daddy’s girl, even after his treatment of his family.

The third part, and the rest of the book flip between Wren and Darra’s point of view. The poems are separated by titles and underneath the title has the name of the character. The poems for Darra continue to be longer in length across the page whereas Wren’s are a tad shorter.

I Don’t Surface from Darra’s perspective is a distressing poem. “...I pull away, then reach for her arms,/but she gets my hair, pulls me toward her,/and kicks hard to surface. Only-I don’t surface-I stay/under. She’s holding me down/and I can’t get away. I tap her three times-she won’t let me up-Wren!-I don’t care if she pulls out a fistful of my hair-I need air!” The use of dashes and exclamation points emphasize the seriousness of the situation. This is especially troublesome because Wren has seemed rather...normal about the whole Darra being at the camp thing. But Wren begins to realize maybe she is not as healed as she thought.

The audiobook, which can be located at your local library’s Overdrive program, is approximately 2 hours long. It is read by Sisi Aisha Johnson and Maria Cabezas. This reader listened to the audiobook at 1.5x. The voices of the two narrators are close to one another. Maybe listening at 1.5x diluted some of their distinctive speech patterns. Both narrators enunciate properly, but they don’t really give unique voices to other characters to distinguish them from others. The narrators do a good job emphasizing the dashes and exclamation points. There doesn’t really seem to be a rhythm to the poems in this book. With the exception of the points where there are the dashes, exclamation points, or other such punctuation marks, it reads just like a regular novel.

The content of this book surprised me. Many novels in verse tend to surprise me. I don’t imagine I’ll care much for them and suddenly I’m listening to a story about a girl who is accidentally kidnapped! Where is this going to go?! It is always a pleasant surprise when that happens.


Review Excerpt(s)
VOYA - “Many teen readers will identify with Wren and Darra and how events that happened to us when we were younger help shape the person we become.”
BOOKLIST - “Like Frost's Printz Honor Book, Keesha's House (2003), this novel in verse stands out through its deliberate use of form to illuminate emotions and cleverly hide secrets in the text.”

Connections 
Students could practice writing a poem from another character’s POV - such as Wren’s mother when she goes into the little store or Darra’s father.
In Science, students could do some “Drown or Float” experiments to go with the game that is played at camp.
At the beginning of the novel, Wren’s mother leaves her alone in the car with the keys in the ignition. This could get students talking about whether they agree or disagree and evolved into a persuasive argument. Students can research kidnappings, car jacks, or kids dying in cars to support their arguments.