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?
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?
3.5 Magical and beautiful stars...
The Taking is a story about accepting your fate and trying to find some normalcy in events where you are the only one who seems sane.
After Kyra wakes up behind a garbage dumpster, she realizes that she doesn't remember anything that happened after her and her dad's fight. Everything seems the same but at the same time, everything is also different. That's when she finds out that it's been five years since the night of the fight and everything around her changed except Kyra. Parents are divorced, her old boyfriend is dating her best friend, and she needs to figure out what to do with her life because she's officially 21. The only thing that makes her feel better is Tyler, a boy across the street who is not a twelve year old that he used to be.
"Awkward or not, you should know I'm glad you're back. And now that I'm older, I'll try to be a little more memorable."
Tyler seems to be the only one who understands her struggle and accepts her situation. But when she gets a tail from NSA who want to do testing on her, Kyra needs to disappear from their eyes. She finds a group of people who claim to have gotten through the same thing as she has and now they have to run from danger and from experiments that government wants to put them through.
"Love required sacrifice and makng hard choices and doing things that were bigger than just you. It wasn't something you asked for, or could control or change. It was something you accepted. Love was a force of nature."
I'm a huge fan of Kimberly Derting and absolutely love her writing. That why I was confused when I started reading The Taking.. Story started out a little slow and since the beginning was mostly already written in book's summary, it wasn't surprising. I mostly knew what was going to happen anyways. The "insta love" that happened between Kyra and Tyler was a little cheesy but as the story progressed, I actually appropriated the progress that was described.
After about 50% of the book that's when it started being interesting. The whole alien invasion started to become twisted and that was that. That was the point where I saw why I love Derting's writing so much. Action, raw emotions, the chase - this is what I was expecting. Ending was incredible and I cannot wait to the sequel.
