Review: The Taking

The Taking (The Taking #1)
by Kimberly Derting 
Hardcover, 368 pages 
Expected publication: April 29th 2014
 by HarperTeen
ARC from Netgalley
Goodreads | Amazon| B & N | TBD

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?

Have you ever watch this show called 4400 where people just vanished into thin air and then came back so suddenly without seeming to age and now they gained cool new superpowers?

Yes, this is basically the plot of this book. Kyra; the star of her high school soccer team suddenly disappeared after jumping out of her dad's car during an argument. Five years later she re appeared and discovered that everyone had thought she was dead and had moved on with their lives. 

As Kyra desperately tried to come to grips with the changes around her (her mother had remarried, her boyfriend's kid brother now have the hots for her) she also found out that she's not the only one who has been taken and all of the taken returned with some kind of superhuman abilities but not without some consequences. Their blood is apparently lethal to normal human beings and once come into contact can cause immediate death.

With sinister secret agents hell bent on hunting and rounding up all of the taken, Kyra is forced to flee her home with the help of Simon; a stranger claiming to be one of the taken. Despite the obvious similarities between the book and the show, it's hard not to get swept away by the conspiracy theory and the burning desire to uncover who or what actually abducted all of these people in the first place and the real reason why they were taken. For me,the main pull of the story is in solving that mystery  because the characters (especially Kyra) just annoyed me most of the time.

Understandably since it is part of the series, we will not get a conclusive explanation regarding to the kidnapping but that ending is just way bizarre for me to even make sense of.