Is this a good idea for a book? In a summary it goes like this- the main character is a girl who gets kidnapped by a man who thinks she is his dead daughter. He takes her out of the country, and hides here in a mountanious region. Meanwhile, the girls boyfriend is communicating with her, and they work on an escape plan. She escapes, the man goes to a mental hospital.The End.
Out flew the web, and floated wide, The mirror cracked from side to side. 'The curse has come upon me' cried The Lady of Shalott
Well if you believe in the idea then it may work. Its the VERY bare bones of it and a little cliched. Perhaps you could expand it, grow on the idea, add twists and turns. Look at the cliche again and think how you can make it different from everything else.
In summary it sounds endlessly uninventive. But being summary - who could tell? (No, I don't much care for summarisation - excellent way to kill something in words.)
I can imagine with quirky characters, and a light touch - it might all be very amusing without losing touch with its 'reality'. It would all be in the portrayal though. As it is, there seems little to go on. Do you have more than the skeleton? Gotten characters yet?
ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem
"There is adventure in simply being among those we love, and among the things we love -- and beauty, too."
If you really focused on the 'father's' problems, i.e, what exactly is going on inside his head that had convinced himself so surely that this girl is his daughter (previous mental problems, or the stress of his daughter's death and his complete mental breakdown) I think that this would be a fantastic story.
"A people without history is like wind in the buffalo grass."
As the others have said, if you flesh it out with some original/quirky characters and such, then I think this could be very good. Unfortunately, it also has the potential to sink into nothingness or (even worse) become torturous to read because you go too much into the tortures of the old man's mind in thinking that he has found his daughter.
So in short: It can be pulled off, but you'd have to buckle down to the challange.
The robbed that smiles, steals something from the thief. ~William Shakespeare, Othello Boo. SPEW is watching.
I think, instead of focusing on the old man, it would be cool to focus on the GIRL. Too many stories try to make these kinds of people the victim, when the real victim the one kidnapped.
I don't know if any of that made sense, but it did in my head!
Got YWS? I do.
Lumi: Don't you drag my donobby into this. Lumi: He's the sweetest angel this side of hades.
