People are never meant to be treated like property. Animals are property to be sold and bartered for, but girls and women never should be.

The Glass Arrow, published in February 2015 and written by Kristen Simmons, follows a 16-year-old born and raised on a forested mountain outside a busy city. Her mother died four years previous and she is left to tend for her cousin, two little fraternal twins, and the twins’ mother. She must protect her cousin, the little twin girl, as well as herself from being captured and sold by the trackers.

In this dystopian novel, readers plunge into Aya’s story as the most dangerous episode of her life begins. A pack of trackers find their way to the mountain where Aya and her remaining family live hidden from the men who seek to capture and sell the girls. Unfortunately, Aya is caught, after trying to save the twins’ brother and mother. She is ripped from her forested mountain and shipped off to “the Garden,” a holding prison for girls to await the auction.In the process, she is stripped of everything that reminds her of home except her fading memories. The auction presents the grotesque opportunity for men to buy any girl he pleases for any price.

Aya must escape the watchful guards and the governess who struggle to shove Aya into her worst nightmare, the auction, without a single blemish. Sadly, she never seems to outwit them. Aya is trapped inside electrified fences keeping her from the only family she has known.

Aya left her scared cousin with two young twins in the forest with very little skills to survive. She must use all her strength to break out of her prison, but in the midst of an escape plan, she meets a man who holds her attention and mind captive without realizing it.

Aya was told the glass arrow story when she was young. Mother Hawk, ruler of nature and recipient of souls, challenged a deer and a fox to a race for the glass arrow that would feed their families in the midst of the famine. The deer ran the trail without the fox and received the arrow. He gave it to the fox who, in turn, shot the deer. The foxes starved, but the dying deer’s blood seeping into the ground sprouted grass for the deer’s family to survive. Aya never forgot that story and was willing to sacrifice for her own family.

Overall, the novel is quite entertaining as it sucks the reader into Aya’s mind and rolls them over as the hazardous events unfold and reshape Aya’s view of the world as well as the people in it.