In the shadow of the young girls in the cellar

This paper explores how teen and young adult novels quickly appropriated the Austrian news stories about the young girls who had been abducted, held hostage, starved, assaulted, raped, and sometimes impregnated, on occasion involving incest. My corpus (which includes Maite Carranza’s Palabras envenenadas, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Natasha Preston’s The Cellar) enables me to focus on the resources that these female authors use to tell the story, as well as to untangle these situations and communicate the experience of them to the reader.