User:Themadhatter222/sandbox

Author
Natasha Preston began her career by using Wattpad in 2010 as a means of expressing her inner creativity. As she read more stories on Wattpad, she began to experiment with her own writing. One of the books that began on Wattpad is The Cellar. Natasha Preston (often referred to as 'Tasha' or 'Tash') lives in the England countryside with her husband, Joseph, and her two kids.

Summer is Taken
The novel begins with Summer going to attend a party, in which there are many indications of foreshadowing the kidnapping to come. Her parents do not allow her to go alone, yet she strays from the group, and a man stops her and warns her about date-rape drugs. When she is taken by her kidnapper, he refers to her as 'Lily,' which begins the premise of the novel.

During the Kidnapping
The vast majority of the book is set during the kidnapping, in the basement of Clover's house. He continuously tries to manipulate the girls (and seemingly himself) into suggesting that they are all family and he would never hurt them, all the while physically and mentally torturing them through means of sexual assault and bursts of threatening and violent language and acts he projects on other people (primarily prostitutes). The girls all communicate with one another in their captivity, and work to maintain a clean, hygienic environment as to not upset Clover.

Summer is Found
At the end of the novel Summer and the other girls are found by the police. The main instigator to finding these girls is Lewis, Summer's boyfriend, who cooperates with the police the entirety of the time that Summer is held in captivity. Being that Clover helps in the search for the girls, and because he maintains his composure and his neat appearance in public, it took a while for the community to realize that Collin Brown was the criminal mastermind behind these kidnappings. Ultimately, Clover taking Summer became his downfall because he had only taken women on the streets or prostitutes prior to this offense.

Final notes (Plot)
"The Cellar" incorporates real crime with thriller and suspense. The book supplies different roles to the characters who performed the kidnappings and murders, the people who are kidnapped, and the people who are close with the girls who are taken (specifically Summer, the main protagonist). Natasha Preston does an excellent job at providing intricate details into the minds of characters who are entirely different spectrums of thought. The entirety of the book primarily describes Collin's (the kidnapper aka Clover for the majority of the novel) actions toward the girls and how there are sequential effects to everything that occurs as the girls are trapped inside the cellar in Collin's house. The symbolism of flowers is largely important to the characterization of both the kidnapper and the girls because each girl in the cellar is given a new name based on a flower.

Collin Brown (Clover)
Collin is the kidnapper in the novel, who takes Lily, Rose, Poppy, and Violet, renaming them as their projected personas of flowers. He is projected as a man who is a clean freak, potentially also inferring severe OCD.

Summer Robinson (Lily)
Summer Robinson (aka Lily) is a 16 year-old girl who is kidnapped from a high-school party. She is the main protagonist, and she has several chapters in the novel dedicated to her and her perceptions of what is going on.

Lewis
Lewis is Summer's boyfriend. When she went missing, the reader gets some insight from Louis as an outside perspective of search parties, precautions being taken to find Collin, and his feelings toward Summer while she is gone.

Rose (Kayley)
One of the girls who was kidnapped--the first girl to be kidnapped. She seems to have more of a relationship with Collin than any of the other girls.

Poppy (Rebecca)
Poppy is another girl who was kidnapped by Collin. She was taken off the street, just like Rose and Violet

Violet (Jennifer)
Violet is the earliest girl kidnapped by Collin before Summer: she was taken off the street by Collin with promise for a better life.

Point of View
The perspective of the novel varies by chapter. These perspectives are generally ranging from Summer, to Lewis, to Collin. Have an omniscient point of view allows the novel to switch between the characters who have been affected by the circumstances of the book, while allowing the stories to interlace even if each place of location differs from the rest of the characters in the novel.