Taken

TAKEN; Edward Bloor; New York, Knopf, 2007; 247 pgs.
Young Adult fiction

Feed meets The Scarlet Pimpernel in this flawed but fascinating story of a young girl who is "taken" or kidnapped in a society where rich kids live in fortress-like compounds, only venturing out into the "real" (read: poor) world with Glock-toting guards. Thirteen year old Charity Meyers has written a report about the kidnapping industry, and has undergone what-to-do-if-you-get-taken training in her school, so she is somewhat prepared when she is abducted by a sham doctor in a bogus ambulance. Her thoughts while she is waiting for her ransom to be paid reveal much about the divide in this futuristic society: the rich employ servants who are contractually obligated to reveal nothing about their personal lives and even to work under false names; rich kids are taken out of their compounds only occasionally to give their cast-off clothes to the poor kids or copies of the Ramiro Fortunate series, books about a poor Hispanic boy who does the right thing even when he could make his life easier by stealing or dealing drugs. What happens to Charity during the course of the narrative should be left to the reader to discover. Is Taken a bit heavy-handed in its message? are some of the situations improbable? is the ending somewhat difficult to believe? Yes, but . . . . Taken is a gripping, thought-provoking story about a terrible but completely plausible future, a story where the whole is much more than the sum of its parts, and which teens and adults should find hard to put down and harder to forget.

LW