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THE TAKER
by Alma Katsu
Dr. Luke Findley is on the midnight shift in the emergency room when the police bring in a young woman. Few strangers come to this remote town in northernmost Maine in the winter, and this stranger is accused of a bizarre crime: killing a man and leaving his body in the Great North Woods. The young woman, Lanny, tells the doctor that she and the man in the woods lived in this town at its founding two hundred years ago, until fate sentenced them to an eternity of unhappiness until they atone for their sins.
The man in the woods is Jonathan, son of the town's founder, and the love of Lanny's life. After Lanny commits a terrible sin in the hope of claiming Jonathan for her own, she's banished from town and sent to Boston to serve her penance. In Boston, she falls in with a beguiling yet frightening man, Adair, who has otherworldly powers, including the ability to confer immortality. His world is one of unknown sensual pleasures and seemingly limitless power, but at what price?
Adair wants to add Jonathan to the collection of treacherous courtiers who do his bidding (but for unknown ends) and sends Lanny back to Maine to collect him. It seems like the answer to Lanny's deepest desire—to be with Jonathan forever—but once Jonathan has joined Adair's pack of immortals, she sees that Adair is not what he seems and his intentions toward Jonathan are far worse than she imagined. And now it is up to her to save her beloved—and herself—from a terrible fate designed to last for all eternity.
The Taker is a story of the power of love to corrupt, to drive us to do terrible things in its name, and the courage it takes to sacrifice in the name of love and ultimately be worthy of absolution. http://almakatsu.com/books.php
Staggering
The Taker was an emotional and thrilling experience. Other than a bit of lagging, and perhaps a rushed ending, I had a hard time finding fault with anything. The writing is beautiful and rich, but real. The research was great, the characters were well developed, the story was unrepentantly hopeless. The emptiness of the lives of the characters in their loves, in family, in morality, is contrasted by them having weathered horrid ordeals, come to grips with immortality, and with the meaninbg of what it is to live. Is living just staying alive and impervious to illness throughout eternity or is it to love with the inevitability of death? You may have attended the memorial service of someone who passed young and heard they lived more in a short life than some do in a hundred years. This is a story about people living forever doing things but with continual emptiness that time to live doesn't fill. This is about the futility of loving someone who is so oblivious to your love they will never give you what you need. This is a story where living without that person, yet knowing they are out there is better than knowing they are gone.
This story throws mortality into relief, there's a cost to immortality but there is also a cost in the living of our brief time.In fiction, immortals seem to completely lose their moral compass. There is no guarantee of happiness EVER with immortality. Happiness is in the moment. But, immortality, watching time and history pass would be amazing. Lanny, the main female character has changed and grown from the poverty of nineteenth century rural Maine in love with a man who doesn't love her back to a woman living now, proof that money doesn't buy happiness.
This is one of those books you want to tell your friends about in the way that you tell them an important personal story, and I can't do that without spoilers. I know that this week I said another book was sad and cruel, but in this it works.
And yet, this is a trilogy so maybe happiness is in the future for these star crossed characters.
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The Taker was an emotional and thrilling experience. Other than a bit of lagging, and perhaps a rushed ending, I had a hard time finding fault with anything. The writing is beautiful and rich, but real. The research was great, the characters were well developed, the story was unrepentantly hopeless. The emptiness of the lives of the characters in their loves, in family, in morality, is contrasted by them having weathered horrid ordeals, come to grips with immortality, and with the meaninbg of what it is to live. Is living just staying alive and impervious to illness throughout eternity or is it to love with the inevitability of death? You may have attended the memorial service of someone who passed young and heard they lived more in a short life than some do in a hundred years. This is a story about people living forever doing things but with continual emptiness that time to live doesn't fill. This is about the futility of loving someone who is so oblivious to your love they will never give you what you need. This is a story where living without that person, yet knowing they are out there is better than knowing they are gone.
This story throws mortality into relief, there's a cost to immortality but there is also a cost in the living of our brief time.In fiction, immortals seem to completely lose their moral compass. There is no guarantee of happiness EVER with immortality. Happiness is in the moment. But, immortality, watching time and history pass would be amazing. Lanny, the main female character has changed and grown from the poverty of nineteenth century rural Maine in love with a man who doesn't love her back to a woman living now, proof that money doesn't buy happiness.
This is one of those books you want to tell your friends about in the way that you tell them an important personal story, and I can't do that without spoilers. I know that this week I said another book was sad and cruel, but in this it works.
And yet, this is a trilogy so maybe happiness is in the future for these star crossed characters.
Alma Katsu:
Hardcover: 448 pages
Publisher: Gallery Books (September 6, 2011)
Kindle Edition: 923 KB
Print Length: 448 pages
Publisher: Gallery Books (September 6, 2011)
Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
Paperback: 448 pages (UK?)
Publisher: Century
Hardcover: 448 pages
Publisher: Gallery Books (September 6, 2011)
Kindle Edition: 923 KB
Print Length: 448 pages
Publisher: Gallery Books (September 6, 2011)
Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
Paperback: 448 pages (UK?)
Publisher: Century
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