60 pages • 2 hours read
Monica AryaThe Favorite Girl
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Captivity in Thrillers
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual violence.
The Favorite Girl follows in the tradition of thrillers about women in captivity. One novel that helped innovate the modern version of this trope is Kiss the Girls by James Patterson. It was published in 1995 and adapted into a film starring Morgan Freeman as Detective Alex Cross in 1997. A new television series called Cross, starring Aldis Hodge as Detective Cross, came out in 2024, demonstrating the enduring influence of Patterson’s series. Kiss the Girls features men who hold women in captivity, essentially collecting them, as Ian Ivory does in The Favorite Girl.
However, Arya’s novel turns the idea of collecting into a capitalistic endeavor. Ian sells the collected women as docile “virgin” brides. The brainwashing of the women imprisoned by the Ivory family can be compared to the brainwashing that the women undergo in The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin. The 1972 novel was adapted into a film multiple times, in 1975 and 2004. The women imprisoned by Ian also have their reproduction controlled. This can be compared to how women are used for procreation in 
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