Book review: Hope - memoir of two of the Cleveland hostages

Two teenage girls vanished from their Cleveland neighbourhood over a period of a year. A decade passed. Hope for their survival waned. Then on May 6, 2013, a woman escaped from a house in the neighbourhood and gave the incredible news: she was one of the missing teenagers, now aged 27. Even more incredibly, two other women were locked in the house, and one of them was the other missing teen.

The owner of the house, a former school bus driver, was arrested and convicted. After serving one month of a life sentence plus 1,000 years, he hanged himself in his prison cell.

tells the story of two of the women's survival, with help from the Pulitzer Prize-winning husband-wife team of Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan. The book is an easy read, although not necessarily always an interesting one.

Ariel Castro lured all three of his victims into his vehicle with the offer of a ride. Once the victims were in his vehicle, Castro drove them to his home, chained them, gagged them, raped them repeatedly - up to five times a day - and held them prisoner in the upstairs bedrooms of his unremarkable-looking house.

All three victims were small, no match for Castro, although he was only a paunchy 1.7-metre-tall man. He concealed his prisoners' presence by constantly blasting loud radio music and not allowing anyone onto the second floor of his house.