Early Review: The Taking by Kimberly Derting

Title: The Taking
Author: Kimberly Derting
Series: The Taking #1
Publisher: HarperTeen
Release Date: April 29, 2014
Source: eARC
Find it Here: Amazon, Goodreads

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?

My Thoughts:

Kimberly Derting has been one of my favorite authors for a very long time. I’m a huge fan of The Body Finder series and even though The Pledge wasn't that great for me, I was super excited when I found out she was releasing a new series! The Taking was literally the first book that I read this year! I was so excited about my ARC that I couldn't wait to dive right in.

The Taking is about a sixteen year old girl named Kyra who, after a softball game, suddenly disappears without a trace. She wakes up behind the dumpster of her local gas station 5 years later but it feels like the next morning to her. She’s still wearing her softball uniform and hasn't aged a day. Soon, a mysterious stranger starts showing up everywhere she goes and Kyra soon discovers that there is a lot more behind her disappearance than she originally thought.

Even though Kyra is a good main character I didn't feel all that emotionally attached to her. Everything that happens, her disappearance and reappearance, all happens so fast in the very beginning that you don’t really get a chance to become attached to the life that she had before. Most of the story is her struggle with accepting that everyone has moved on without her. We, the readers, don’t get the chance to know the Kyra before, we only know the person that Kyra becomes after she resurfaces.

I really enjoyed the relationship between Kyra and Tyler who incidentally is her “before” boyfriend’s younger brother. Since five years has now passed, Tyler is one year older than Kyra. They become really close throughout the book, both trying to figure out what happened to her. Tyler is really super cute! He always admired his older brother's girlfriend and now here she is, she hasn't aged a day and he has the chance to actually get to know her! I really like that he kind of always held a candle for her!

The plotting and the pacing of the book were a little bit slow at times, especially in the middle but it really kicks up towards the end, making me hopeful that book two will be an action-packed adventure. There was also a bit of a cliffhanger at the end which made me really excited! I don’t generally like cliffhangers but this one made me really anticipate the rest of the series! Oh, and since I wasn't super obvious about it, it’s about aliens which we definitely don’t have enough of in YA right now.

The Taking was a really great book to start the year off with and now in just a couple of weeks everyone can enjoy it as well! Not only was it a great start to a really exciting new series, it can really appeal to those readers who are new to sci-fi!