The Favorite Girl

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 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, which was published in 1985 and developed as a television series that premiered in 2017. The women in The Handmaid’s Tale are not wives, but their forced reproduction can be compared to that of Demi, Daphne, and the Ivory family’s other brides.

Other influential predecessors in the captivity subgenre include Room by Emma Donoghue, which was published in 2010 and adapted into a film in 2015. This book is about a woman who is trapped in a room with her son and sexually assaulted. The son’s innocence in the novel can be compared to Demi’s innocence in The Favorite Girl, as Demi lacks education and is often naive because she is a survivor of human trafficking. Arya’s novel was also preceded by the 2016 novel The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison. The kidnapper in this novel, called the Gardener, takes girls who are slightly younger than the women Ian abducts. Demi is 19, while Hutchison’s character Maya is only 16.

Arya also heavily draws upon the genre of romance, as some of her other novels are romances. One influential romance-fantasy series is Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses, which came out in 2015 and was immensely popular on “BookTok” on TikTok. The protagonist, Feyre, is imprisoned in the vast estate of a faerie lord as a result of the death of a faerie on human land. As the political situation becomes more complex, Feyre is forced to sexually exhibit herself by crueler faerie lords. The narrative of imprisonment and exploitation is similar in structure to that in The Favorite Girl, but the difference in genre means that the culmination of the relationship between Feyre and Tamlin is viewed positively, unlike the coercive assaults in The Favorite Girl.

Maas’s work was preceded by authors such as Anne Rice. Rice’s Sleeping Beauty series, written under the pseudonym A. N. Roquelaure, features Beauty, along with other princesses and princes, becoming sexually enslaved in a fantasy kingdom. Like Demi, the women in the Sleeping Beauty books are taught to be submissive. However, Rice’s novels are fully in the genre of BDSM, while The Favorite Girl is a thriller with sexual elements.