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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Oct 2007, 272 pages
Paperback:
Dec 2009, 256 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Jo Perry
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By 2035 the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and kidnapping has become a major growth industry in the United States. The children of privilege live in secure, gated communities and are escorted to and from school by armed guards. But the security around Charity Meyers has broken down...
By 2035 the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and kidnapping has become a major growth industry in the United States. The children of privilege live in secure, gated communities and are escorted to and from school by armed guards.
But the security around Charity Meyers has broken down. On New Year's morning, she wakes and finds herself alone, strapped to a stretcher, in an ambulance that's not moving. She is amazingly calm - kids in her neighborhood have been well trained in kidnapping protocol. If this were a normal kidnapping, Charity would be fine. But as the hours of her imprisonment tick by, Charity realizes there is nothing normal about what's going on here. No training could prepare her for what her kidnappers really want . . . and worse, for who they turn out to be.
EXCERPT
Once you’ve been taken, you usually have twenty-four hours left to live. By my reckoning, that meant I had about twelve hours remaining. The blue numerals on my vidscreen showed the time, 11:31, and the date, 01-01-36. From where I was lying, the blue glow of the vidscreen provided the only color in the room. If it was a room. Other than the screen, all I could see were white walls. All I could hear was a low thrumming, like an engine.
Ever since I’d come to my senses, though, I’d felt strangely calm. Not like a sedated calm, either, although I had definitely been sedated. No, it was more of a logical calm. I was trying not to panic; trying to think things through. I was not in this room of my own free will. Therefore, I was a prisoner. Logically, then, I must have been “taken,” the popular euphemism for “kidnapped.”
If you lived in The Highlands, like I did, then you were an expert on kidnapping. I even wrote a paper on the subject. ...
Taken's vision of families where hired help do the parenting, and of a world where racial and economic injustice imprison both rich and poor is made vivid by the anger and brilliance that inform Bloor's most successful, moving and darkest novels—Tangerine and Crusader...continued
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(Reviewed by Jo Perry).
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children posts the following U.S. Department of Justice statistics on taken children:
It is reassuring to ...
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