Taken

Author: Erin Bowman
Goodreads Rating: 4.15
Pages: 352
Format: ARC from the Publisher

There are no men in Claysoot. There are boys—but every one of them vanishes at midnight on his eighteenth birthday. The ground shakes, the wind howls, a blinding light descends…and he’s gone.

They call it the Heist.

Gray Weathersby’s eighteenth birthday is mere months away, and he’s prepared to meet his fate–until he finds a strange note from his mother and starts to question everything he’s been raised to accept: the Council leaders and their obvious secrets. The Heist itself. And what lies beyond the Wall that surrounds Claysoot–a structure that no one can cross and survive.

Climbing the Wall is suicide, but what comes after the Heist could be worse. Should he sit back and wait to be taken–or risk everything on the hope of the other side?

Taken was very different from what I usually read. It was about a boy rather than a girl and the premise was something that was very unique. Boys are taken from the community the night that they turn 18 and no one knows what happens to them. In this book we learn what is really going on with these boys and what is causing this sudden departure from their town. I found the idea of heists to be really original and new. This community, which I assume is sort of like how natives would live (at least that’s how I pictured it) was small and full of women because all the men are taken at 18.

Our narrator is 17 year old, Gray, a boy whose older brother has just been claimed by the Heist. I haven’t decided if I like him or not for a few reasons. He was very quick to make decisions and act, which was understandable (sort of) in a teenage boy, but all the other men around him grew up so much faster and they didn’t behave the way that he did. I did admire him for not wanting to father a baby when he was just going to vanish in a few short years, even if it did mean that the society would start to crumble from people not reproducing.

Most of the story takes place while is his over the Wall with his (sort of) girlfriend Emma. Over the wall we discover that the world is very different from what the people of Claysoot thought it would be like. Here we have what is not what everyone thought it was going to be, instead we have a dystopian society that is trying to breed perfect soldiers in the most untraditional way; by forcing survival of the fittest. I really liked that rather than get sucked into this world and take it at face value, Emma chose to question things and puzzle out what was really happening. I didn’t trust Frank from the getgo because, lets be honest, our hero has to fall into the hands of the charismatic bad guy before discovering the truth.

Even when the book ends, we’re still learning exactly what the truth is. I still have some suspicious about what exactly is going on with Taem, the city that Gray and Emma wind up in. I have even more suspicious about what Frank has really done to try to infiltrate the rebels, its clear that all he wants is power which is why I think that there is more going on than was revealed. I was a little disappointed that this book fell into the cliché of a Love triangle. I was hoping that Gray would be stronger and stick to his assertion that he loves Emma and that shes the only one he could love, but I’m not sure I can fault him. He is from a village that doesn’t have anything remotely close to forever, they have only 18 years of a boy to love a girl, and then he is gone.

I’m excited to see what the next book is going to bring, since it is bound to be a trilogy. I liked that we had a lot more information than you usually get in a first book in a series. A lot of what we learned was great to know, and there were several surprises that I’m sure if you thought long and hard, you could see coming, but they were quite pleasant anyway.

The Courts Decision: