Author: Erin Bowman
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!
Way to go with the unoriginal title! BN.com has 410 pages with "Taken" in the title, and the first page has 24 entries exactly the same title as this one. When I picked this up and began reading it, it was because I mistook Erin Bowman for Erin Bow - a mistake for which I humbly apologize to the latter. "Has she finally sold out?" I asked myself, disbelievingly. She was never an indie author per se, but her previous novels had the feel of indie writing: they were different, interesting, if dark, and had a unique tale to tell. This new series was, to use a term from the series itself, a forgery. It was not her, and that alone should have clued me in to the fact that I'd misidentified the author! Me culpa. Mea maxima culpa! Erin Bow ne in furore tuo arguas me!
This novel was nothing like Erin Bow. This novel was poor, weak, shallow, and a fragile and pale shadow of what Erin Bow can write. It's like a self-published first draft by someone who is only just beginning to learn how to write, and it's several sorry leagues away from Bow's fables. The cover tag-line on this novel should have read, "Once you're over the hill, there's no going back." I don't do covers because authors (unless they're self-published), typically have nothing to do with them, but I did note that the cover for this (and for the sequel) is designed with the same lack of regard for women which the novel itself displays. Macho-up the guy, diminish the unimportant girl.
Taken is your standard dys-trope-ian trilogy and unsurprisingly, it suffers the same problems as other YA trilogies in this genre. I can see why Marie Lu would ask for "More, please!" on the cover: this is sorrier than even her sad-sack Legend excuse for an effort, so why wouldn't she want something worse out there to distract attention from her own garbage?
The basic story is completely nonsensical, and is your usual world gone bad (with no explanation offered as to exactly why or how). Young adults, of course, are the only ones who can fix it. Instead of north v. south this time, it's east v. west for no reason other than to try, amateurishly, to be different.
We meet character Gray in a scene ripped right out of the start of The Hunger Games: he's out hunting in the forest with a bow, and later he trades part of his catch for something at the market. He's been friends with Emma from childhood. They live in a tiny village absurdly named Claysoot, and this village is cursed by having its 18 year-old males, on the morning of their birthday anniversary, spirited up into the sky in a beam of light. Females are left behind with the younger males. Could it be any more of a rip-off of Hunger Games?
No one knows what this vanishing of men is, or why it works this way. The villagers never see the men again, and they do not know what becomes of them. These people cannot leave the village to escape this horror because it's surrounded by a huge wall, and those few who have climbed over the wall have been returned dead, their bodies nicely crisped.
By village records, this life has been going on for 47 years, and people have become conditioned like lab rats (in that ridiculously short time) to accept and even embrace this fate. Never once have they considered not having children to put an end to all this! On the contrary - the children are forced by city ordinance into random mating pairs in order to get the girls pregnant, because this is yet another YA author who thinks girls are second rate and second hand - not fit to be heisted, but fit to be bare-foot, pregnant, and in the kitchen where, according to the author, they evidently belong.
We learn later that there are five such villages, but rather than appreciate fifty percent of the population, the author further insults women by remarking that in one of these villages, the women were good enough to be heisted! Way to insult your readership! "Only one in five women is of any value" - Erin Bowman!
This particular year, when the novel begins, Gray loses his brother, Blaine, to the Heist (as it's known), and he learns from Emma that she thinks there's something odd about how this village came to be (apparently the original inhabitants had their minds wiped so they could not pass on how they got there).
From a secret diary which he conveniently happens upon, Gray learns that he isn't Blaine's younger brother, but his twin, and therefore should have been heisted with his sibling. Why did this not happen? The explanation (I use that word very loosely) as to how Gray doesn't know he's a twin is so unrealistic as to be a complete farce. It's so self-evidently bad that it's not even necessary to offer support for this assertion.
Straight out of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Gray also conveniently (this novel is so jam-packed with oh-so-convenient happenstance that it's truly pathetic) discovers a letter from his mom to his brother, but with a final page missing so he can't learn what the crucial information is! The letter is reproduced in the text, in a script font, but the last line ends in the middle of the line! In other words, there's no reason at all why the revelation (that Gray is Blaine's twin) couldn't have appeared on that same line! It's so beyond nonsensical that it's way-the-hell over into deeply pathetic. So, Blaine decides to go over the wall, and for no reason at all, Emma decides to follow him.
On the other side of the wall, the two of them are conveniently picked up by some people who drive them in a car to a domed city (Taem - apparently an acronym for Totally Amateur, Excruciatingly Mediocre), where Gray learns from the city leader, Mr Frank, that the village of Claysoot is an experiment begun by 'mad scientist' Harvey Maldoon, who is now a wanted criminal. Gray also meets his brother who, it turns out, happens to be carrying the last page of the letter! How convenient! All of the men who were 'heisted' are living in this domed city.
Here's some bad writing: we're repeatedly told that the dome has a water shortage. Indeed, one guy who stole an extra jug for his sick family was summarily executed, yet these people are living in a dome. If they have the kind of technology to do mind-wipes and build city-sized domes, then why can they not desalinate seawater? Why is there no recycling? It makes NO SENSE AT ALL. It's amateur, trashy, brain-dead writing.
Here's some more bad writing: Gray is taken to the "Cleansing Room" (seriously amateur naming here - the military faction is named The Order"! lol!) where he's cleaned up and given the red pills, and has a tracker device implanted in his skin. He also has his head shaved. Emma, for reasons unexplained, gets none of this - at least, not as far as having her head shaved. Instead, she gets a make-over! This city of severe restrictions on resources offers free make-overs and high heeled shoes...?
Gray is so stupid that he doesn't even question the fact that Emma has been treated differently from him. Indeed, this unquestioning acceptance of whatever befalls him is a trait of this worthless male lead. He is so gullible that he swallows whatever anyone tells him, even if it flatly contradicts something he's already been told by someone else, which he had previously swallowed equally unquestioningly! Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!
Here's where the love interest fails. We're told that Emma and Gray are lifelong friends, but they've had no interest in each other as anything more than friends, yet suddenly they're in love? Yeah, the author puts in a brief description as to how Gray is inexplicably tutoring Emma in archery, and this supposedly accounts for their falling in love, but it's all bullshit. There's no reason at all for the tutoring other than to get them together, and there's no reason, even being together, why they would fall in love so fast. We've been told, for example, that Emma is an avowed bachelor who disliked Gray and preferred Blaine, so how are we expected now to swallow that suddenly, she's fifty shades of Gray? This is appallingly bad writing.
So Gray flees the city, leaves his 'ain trew love' Emma behind, and hooks-up with the rebels - yep, it was that easy. Everything conveniently fell right into line every single time he needed it to! First he stumbles upon supply trucks which are heading out to resupply a scouting party which is conveniently hunting the rebels in precisely the area to which Gray wanted to go. After Gray abandons the trucks when they stop for the night, he's conveniently captured by that very scouting party. Don't question the timeline here - not if you want to retain your sanity.
Oh, and bro Blaine happens to be conveniently there too, because he was conveniently part of the scouting party! Right at the point where Gray is about to be shot in the head as a spy, the party is conveniently attacked so he can escape, and then the attackers conveniently vanish! This is atrociously and amateurishly bad writing. Where the hell was the book editor?
Why the rebels conveniently vanish is a mystery because the next thing that happens is that Gray conveniently happens to stumble upon a female love interest who takes him prisoner. and delivers him right into the rebel camp where, conveniently, his father happens to be a captain in the rebel alliance! How convenient!
When I'd decided my rating of this novel, I looked at some reviews to see if I'd missed anything, or if there was something which might change my mind (there wasn't!), but one thing I'd neglected to comment on was when Gray gets into a fist-fight with a girl from the village named Chalice (don't get me started on the dumb-ass names here). Several people reacted with shock over this, that he punched a girl, but no one remarks upon the fact that he gets as good as he gives! These people really should not have had that reaction - not if they're honestly in favor of gender equality!
The real problem here wasn't that Gray hit a girl, but that he hit a person, period. Yes, Chalice was thoroughly obnoxious, but his response was over the top (and he was never punished for it). So our supposedly heroic lead male here has poor impulse control! Here's the thing though: I'll bet that if Chalice had been a guy and all else had remained exactly the same, then people would not have felt so compelled to remark upon it. Or how about this: what if the roles had been reversed, and Gray had been obnoxious, and Chalice had slapped him? How many people would have remarked upon that, much less had a tirade over it? That's what's really wrong here. Gender equality cuts both ways, but far too many people simply do not get that. You can't be equal if one side continues to get privileges and free passes.
But this offers us another example of how badly written this novel is. The author depicts Gray here as being reckless and aggressive, with a hair trigger temper, yet later in the novel, around page 250, when a guy punches him, Gray does not react in any way at all - he just takes it and moves on, even though the attack was completely unwarranted. This is god-awfully bad writing. And let's not get into the fact that while Gray himself has no problem with enjoying two female love interests, he gets all pissy about Emma taking a lover when she thinks Gray is dead.
The other issue here is the 'twin' trope. Gray and Blaine are identical twins, yet they're as different as chalk and cheese. I ran into this same inexplicable issue in Sea of Shadows. These differences would have been fine except that the author offers not a single thing to account for how they came to be so different. They're clones (for that's exactly what identical twins are), raised together in the same environment in the same way in a small village. They've spent their entire lives together, yet they're completely different in every way? How did this happen? The author cannot tell us, and that's bad writing.
Talking of which, around page 218 comes some of the worse writing from a professional novelist that I've ever seen. Gray is to be judged by a committee of five people, only one of which is female. They vote yea or nay (those are the exact words!) on whether Gray should live or die (and this is without a trial). As it happens, the vote is 3:2 in favor of leaving him alive (how else could it go - he's the fricking narrator of the novel! This is another example of how clueless the author is in this trilogy), but even though he demands answers, they put him off, telling him to go get cleaned up, and get some rest! But after that, his father does condescend to pass on some information in a big fat info-dump.
Gray learns of the forgeries, and this is arguably the most absurd piece of this novel of all the absurd pieces. Evidently they can create only one good forgery (apparently a clone) from each person. This is supposedly why the Claysoot and the four other communities were begun: to raise tough, independent boys (because you know girls are useless according to this author), who could then be cloned to create an army.
This is in a city where they can't even desalinate water, yet they have this amazingly advanced technology? Even with this technology, they can only clone once - repeat clones turn out to be weaklings. This is the purest of the rankest horse droppings. It makes no sense. If they have this kind of advanced technology, why not create super weapons? This crap is no way to create an army. It is a great way to create nonsense in the extreme.
Here's another complete absurdity: The 'soldiers' in The Order get zero training (Blaine is already a trusted member when Gray arrives there, and Gray is drafted on his first day) unless you consider getting a buzz cut to be the functional equivalent of six weeks at Paris island), yet the Order is feared by the rebels, who actually get a military fitness regime thrust upon them! LoL!
Here's one more clunker: these guys discover that Frank has developed an airborne virus to wipe out the rebels. They can't use it until they've captured Maldoon because they need his skills, but the concern is how they know where the rebels are. Is there a mole? Well we've just been told that these people farm crops out in the open, so by that very act they've identified their location! The rebel camp is only four days walk from the city, and they recently attacked a contingent of soldiers from the city, and now they rebels are wondering how they've been given away? They're morons!
This novel is awful. It's not only the worst kind of trash, but even as fan-fiction it would look bad when compared with other fan-fic.
