A review by hidekisohma
The Taken by Inbali Iserles

2.0

I had this book on my "to-read" list for AGES as i could never find a copy of this book at a used book store. Finally i just ordered a copy from the library. And, thankfully, i spent no money on this book. because it didn't deserve it.

This is the 3rd series i've started of what i call "Feral" books. Books where it's about an animal acting like an animal doing animal things. Not anthropomorphic, but just regular animals that talk to each other. The first was The "promise of the wolf" trilogy, and the second being the first "Warriors" book to see what all the hubbub was about. And, i can tell you, this book reads exactly the same as the rest.

That seems to be the biggest issue with these kind of books. They're all the same. I love foxes and I thought a book about foxes doing fox things would be cool. No. It was extraordinarily dull.

Plot "Fox gets separated from family because of evil foxes. She looks for fox brother with other fox who also wants to find him. The end."

It's basically 250 pages of that. Yes there's explanation over how the fox magic system works, but the fox magic system is VERY light magic and not very exciting.

The positive i will say about this book is that she isn't captain gary stu that is Firepaw from the warriors book, and she is flawed which is nice. However, it's not enough to save the boredom of this book.

Luckily since it's a Juvenile it was very quick to read through, but i just found myself not caring even slightly about what was going to happen to these characters. and that's a shame, as i had been looking forward to this one for a long time.

About 3/4 of the way through the book they do a reveal that i was sitting there like "well, they're certainly not going to reveal THAT because it would be WAYYYY too obvious" and then they did the reveal and i was like "ah. well....okay then." This is kind of why i usually tend to stay away from J books as every time i think they're not going to do the obvious trope because it's too obvious, they do it. and the excuse is always "well it's meant for kids". That's a very lazy argument. Of course, this is not ALL J books as there's plenty that don't do this, but i find it more often than not that this happens.

Now when it comes to rating, i think to myself, would i ever read it again, or read a sequel? anything 3 and up, yes, maybe down the road i WOULD read it again if i felt like it, or keep reading the series. 2 and down, no, i'm stopping here.

This book in itself is a 2.5 as it's not really BAD it's just boring and its been done before and most importantly, i just didn't CARE. So to that end, sadly, no, i'm not going to read the second book.

So, that being said, this book gets a 2.5/5, rounded down to a 2.