Review: Taken by Erin Bowman

Taken by Erin Bowman
Taken, #1

Hardcover, 360 pages

Published April 16th 2013 by HarperTeen

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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?

My Review:

I want to say right off the bat that this book is going to be hard to review. There are lots of conspiracy theories and secrets in this book that aren’t revealed until later in the book. So talking about them would spoil the beginning. So I am going to leave a lot of that out for people who haven’t read the book yet.

I was mostly interested in this book because it sounded like a different twist on the standard dystopian novel. I really wanted to see what the “Heist” was all about. When in reality it is a very small part of the book. They only talk about it a couple times throughout the book.

The big twist comes pretty early in the book and then it goes on to all the secrets and stories between different sides. From then on it turns into a more common dystopian. There is a head leader that controls everything in the city. Water is rationed to the citizens and anyone who steals or commits a crime is usually shot on the spot. It becomes clearer throughout the book who is telling the truth and who isn’t. After that the book became a little less surprising but still managed to hold my interest.

The world building in this book is pretty much nonexistent at first. This however is how it is supposed to be. The main character and everyone else in Claysoot doesn’t know how their world became. They only know what they have been told, which is pretty much all a lie. As the main character Gray learns, so do we. I liked being able to learn as he did and decide what to believe and what not to.

This book managed to capture my attention during the action scenes but then would lose me in between. I think actually liked the first part of the book the best.

Ok, now let’s discuss the characters.

The main character is a boy name Gray Weathersby, named so because of his Gray eyes. He is a wild kid who does whatever comes to his mind and doesn’t really think of others in the process. This is why he beats up a girl right off the bat. I wasn’t a big fan of that but it did give us a good look at his personality. This is also one of the only times this girl is actually mentioned. I thought she would be around a lot more but I was apparently wrong.

The two characters which are included in the love triangle are Emma and Bree. I really can’t think of any book I have read with a male and two girls in the triangle. I actually liked that but I did feel bad for the girls, probably because I can relate more to their feelings.  Bree is the main girl in the story as she is involved in the movement of the story a lot more than Emma is. Emma is pretty much not mentioned through half of the book. I would have expected a lot more thoughts from Gray on her but they never really happened. I actually found myself thinking at one point why he hadn’t said anything about her.

The last character that is close to Gray would be his brother Blaine. I actually really liked his brother because he was the opposite of Gray. He was very level headed and would always think things through or take on the fatherly figure with Gray. Which he was since all the men disappear at 18 the boys grew up without a father.

Do I Recommend this Book/Series?

If you are really into dystopian then I say yes go ahead and pick it up. If you are one of the people that is sort of over the dystopian phase then I say you could probably skip it.

Will I Read the Next Book?

Yes I think I will just because it ended on a part that I actually wanted to learn more about. If it would have ended differently then I’m not sure that I would.

My Rating:

(more like a 3.5)

*This book was provided by Edelweiss & the publisher in exchange for an honest review.