Book Review: The Taking

The Taking

By: Kimberly Derting

Published By: HarperTeen

Publication Date: April 29, 2014

Page Count: 368

Buy it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or IndieBound

Source: ARC Kindly Provided by Publisher via Edelweiss

Audience: Young Adult - Science Fiction

The Taking is the first in a new series following Kyra, a girl who mysteriously disappeared for five years, only to awake as if she had never been gone. She has the same clothes, bruises and hair as the night she disappeared when she wakes up in the parking lot behind a Gas 'n' Sip. She walks home, and then things start to get weird... Everything is different. 

Kyra's return is handled very well, and I found it entirely believable. She is confused, and withdraws from the changes which have occurred. She doesn't want to know that her parents have split up, and her mother has a new family now. She also struggles with what has happened to her boyfriend; she thought they would be together forever, and she isn't prepared to face how he has moved on.

 I really enjoyed the first half of the book, as Kyra figured out what was happening and grew closer to Tyler, the younger brother of her ex boyfriend. I loved how their attraction to each other grew... It was realistic and very sweet. I was less fond of how the book developed. I suppose I was happy enough with the story before the extraterrestrial theme developed. In the end I got used to the idea though, and it will certainly be interesting to see how the rest of the story develops. I found the very end to be a little too convenient to be truly satisfying though. 

For fans of The Body Finder series, I would say you will feel like this is a good new series to invest time in... Kyra and Tyler are no Violet and Jay but there is a similar "real" feel to the world they live in, which brings a plausibility to the alien element that I enjoyed, just as Violet's powers existed in a normal feeling world.

Summary:

A flash of white light . . . and then . . . nothing. 

When sixteen-year-old Kyra Agnew wakes up behind a Dumpster at the Gas ’n’ Sip, she has no memory of how she got there. With a terrible headache and a major case of déjà vu, she heads home only to discover that five years have passed . . . yet she hasn’t aged a day. 

Everything else about Kyra’s old life is different. Her parents are divorced, her boyfriend, Austin, is in college and dating her best friend, and her dad has changed from an uptight neat-freak to a drunken conspiracy theorist who blames her five-year disappearance on little green men. 

Confused and lost, Kyra isn’t sure how to move forward unless she uncovers the truth. With Austin gone, she turns to Tyler, Austin’s annoying kid brother, who is now seventeen and who she has a sudden undeniable attraction to. As Tyler and Kyra retrace her steps from the fateful night of her disappearance, they discover strange phenomena that no one can explain, and they begin to wonder if Kyra’s father is not as crazy as he seems. There are others like her who have been taken . . . and returned. Kyra races to find an explanation and reclaim the life she once had, but what if the life she wants back is not her own?