The Taker by Alma Katsu is the supernatural tale of love over the ages – and I do mean the ages. Would you want to live, a la Dorian Gray, forever? When we meet Lanore, known as Lanny, it is in the emergency room in modern day Maine. She has been brought there by the sheriff who tells the emergency room doctor, Luke Findley, that Lanny is a self-confessed murderer. He needs Dr. Findley to make sure that she is physically okay before he can jail her. Dr. Findley finds nothing wrong with Lanny, but is taken with her story and agrees to help her escape from the sheriff.
Her tale is the real story here, beginning in the early 1800s in St. Andrews, Maine, a Puritan community founded by the St. Andrews family. Lanny becomes besotted with Jonathan St. Andrews, allowing herself to become pregnant with his child as his family announces his engagement to another girl. Banished by her family to a Boston convent to await the birth of her child, Lanny runs away and finds herself alone in Boston. She is offered the “kindness of strangers”, only to be made the “entertainment” for unsavory men. When she awakes she has been injured by their brutality. On the brink of death, she is given an antidote, which saves her life – forever. Thus she becomes one of “them”, who not only control her life but also her
death. And always in her heart and mind is Jonathan St. Andrews, who becomes in explicably tied to Lanny for eternity.
This is such a good book. I do not enjoy supernatural-based fiction, but this was just such a different approach and so well-written! The plot is exciting – you find yourself so caught up in Lanny’s story – you cannot put this book down! Bravo to Katsu on “wow!” debut novel!
Gallery Books provided a review copy of this book. All opinions are my own.
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