I had selected Taken from Bethany House Publishing for the blogger reviewer program hoping to get away from the Christian Romance books they seem to feature a lot their lists. Unfortunately this book, which at first appeared to be a mystery thriller, did not do that for me. If Bethany House does nothing but publish romances, someone please let me know, because that would make a lot more sense. (However, I don't think this is the case, as I've read most of the Tales of Goldstone Wood books they publish, and not all of those are focused on romance.)
There was nothing thrilling about this book, and the mystery aspect was pathetic. This is my first real jump into mystery/thriller fiction, and I was not impressed.
In a traditional story, you have several parts: introduction, build-up, climax, aftermath, and conclusion. This entire book was aftermath with a weak conclusion. All the exciting stuff the story mentions (abductions, survival, action, maybe even adventure) already happened before this story happened.
This book is about a lady who approaches a detective after escaping her captors, hoping he'll help her regain a normal life. During this, there is an awkward romance between the two I simply could not relate to, but I'll discuss that more in my Story part of the review.
Characters
I'm having a hard time knowing where to begin with the characters. The two main characters are Matthew Dane and Shannon Bliss. At least their names are easy to remember. I hardly got anything relevant out of Matthew's character; most of his inner thoughts and reflections were about Shannon (how stoic she can be, how she has hardened herself, how beautiful she is, maybe I can have a relationship with her, etc.), rather than his own feelings and thoughts about himself. I did not relate to this guy at all.
Shannon was a bit more interesting, but we never get her POV. Psychologically she was a realistic character, such as reacting in fear to the family that held her captive (though we only meet one member of the Jacoby family, and he's not blood-related). Even with her hopes and fears, I never related to this character either. It may have been because they weren't involved in any interesting plot to speak of.
There were several other characters, and it took me a little while to keep track of them. There are others I couldn't remember who they were or why they were important.
Story and Writing
If the characters weren't bad enough, the story was seriously lacking. Throughout the book, there is no real build-up to a climax. There are two or three high points in the stories where we actually see something interesting that happened to Shannon, but there is no anticipation, no pertinent suspension. There would be dull, mundane prose and dialogue, and then some “big” reveal. It would be short, and then become dull until the next “big” reveal.
The only part I really liked was when I got a look into one of Shannon's diaries, where she talks about her captivity. However, we only get a look at entries once or twice throughout this tome of paper. Once in a while Shannon decides to talk about what happened too, but...that's it. Everything else they talk about wasn't important to me.
This book is probably about 75% dialogue. There is paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of dialogue. Most of the dialogue is “Let's do this, this, and this. You, go do that. You and you, go do this, and then we'll talk about it more later.” Another large point they talk about is, “Don't push it, or we'll stop talking.” or “We'll only go a certain amount of time before leaving.” Those 3 examples almost completely summed up the entire book's dialogue subjects. Sometimes I couldn't keep track of who was talking because of the lack of breaks between dialogue paragraphs and because of the characters' “tones” of voice.
Most of the characters had the same tone. Most of the time they spoke like robots, using phrases and words normal people wouldn't use in everyday conversation. For example, Matthew is praying to God at one point and he says something to the effect of “thanks for helping her find the fuzzy slippers and me amused.” What? “Me amused”? A normal person would more likely say something like, “Making me smile.” Maybe I'm milking it, but there's a lot of dialogue that sounds unrealistic and annoying.
When we're not reading lists of dialogue, we're reading descriptions of mundane actions. Probably half of the book's prose is descriptions of preparing food and grammatically incorrect sequential sentences. “He got out the car, walked around, opened her door, helped her out.” “He fried a potato, got out the yogurt, put strawberries on it.” I picked up this book, read it, groaned.
Just when I thought I was truly getting to the end of the story, we get an entire chapter detailing how to sell photos in the photography market. It was borderline pointless. The only reason it was there was to point out Shannon could get dues ex machina rich. The author could have summed this up in just a few paragraphs, but she spent an entire chapter, several pages long, on it. And most of it was dialogue.
The Jacoby family. The story synopsis makes it seem they play a central part to the story. In a way they do, but we only see one person from the family, and he's not an enemy. They mention that Shannon could get hurt by one of the members, but me as a reader never truly grasped how dangerous he actually was, especially with Shannon surrounded by cops and the FBI. If the guy had showed up and done some gun-slinging and gotten his due through Matthew's POV, that would have been a great climax and made the whole story mean something. Instead they essentially mention, “Oh, by the way, while you were reading Shannon's diaries last night, we arrested the big villain of this ENTIRE BOOK.” I'm starting to get ideas for how to rewrite this book to make it better, and it's not even my book.
Now for the creepiest part of this story, and by creepy I don't mean interesting.
This story wasn't about Shannon escaping the Jacoby family, or even about her recovery. This was a romance between her and Matthew thinly disguised as a mystery and recovery story. Matthew is 42 years old, and Shannon 27, and they start developing this slightly unnatural relationship. She ends up staying in an apartment with him throughout the majority of the book (he sleeps in his own apartment, but basically spends every other waking minute in her apartment). They talk about not having sex with each other, but they're always putting themselves in the situation to do so. Twilight, anyone?
They develop this friend/romantic relationship throughout the book, and they never end up dating by the end. Matthew talks about it. Maybe it's good there wasn't a marriage or something at the end. He does mention that if he's going to get married and give her kids, they'd need to do it soon. Creeper.
Conclusion
This was one weird book. The way the story was formatted and presented was terrible, and it needs serious editing to put an actual story in it. No offense to the publisher, who specializes in Christian fiction, but I think the only reason they published this was because it mentions God a few times, not because it's a quality book. I would have gotten the same satisfaction out of reading a police case file, perhaps even more because it would actually detail the trouble that happened instead of getting bits and pieces from a somewhat frustrating heroine.
This book is a great example of how not to write a book, and is now part of my baby's toy box. Have at it, my boy!
I received this as a free book from Bethany House Publishing in exchange for a free review.
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