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A review by megelizabeth
Take It Back by Kia Abdullah
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
4.0
This book is pretty much pure pain. It's not one to go into lightly, and it has a lot of content warnings, which I would recommend checking even more so than usual. It's definitely one that's going to stay on my mind.
It's also extremely well-written and tightly-plotted, with a jaw-dropping ending that will continue to haunt me. There's lots of great commentary on many issues, with it never feeling like there are too many topics raised and not enough attention given to each. It took me a while to warm to our protagonist, Zara, but I did come to appreciate her growth, and I absolutely adored her friendship with Safran and, for me, this friendship also plays a really important role thematically in the story.
The main thing I didn't love about this book is more of a me problem than a book problem, as I think it's fairly typical of legal/courtroom thrillers and is one of the reasons I don't read too many of them; it's that there's a big break in time between the beginning of the book and the court scenes, and it felt, to me, as if there was undoubtedly lots we were missing out on. That was probably entirely intentional, and as I've already said, typical of the genre, but it's just something that doesn't tend to work too well for me personally. The only other thing I didn't like and which threw me out of the story a bit was that there's a really odd conversation justifying physical abuse of children, which was so out-of-keeping with the book as a whole which had some really great conversations around abuse, trauma, and difficult familial relationships; it just didn't make sense to me at all why this throwaway conversation should be included.
It's also extremely well-written and tightly-plotted, with a jaw-dropping ending that will continue to haunt me. There's lots of great commentary on many issues, with it never feeling like there are too many topics raised and not enough attention given to each. It took me a while to warm to our protagonist, Zara, but I did come to appreciate her growth, and I absolutely adored her friendship with Safran and, for me, this friendship also plays a really important role thematically in the story.
The main thing I didn't love about this book is more of a me problem than a book problem, as I think it's fairly typical of legal/courtroom thrillers and is one of the reasons I don't read too many of them; it's that there's a big break in time between the beginning of the book and the court scenes, and it felt, to me, as if there was undoubtedly lots we were missing out on. That was probably entirely intentional, and as I've already said, typical of the genre, but it's just something that doesn't tend to work too well for me personally. The only other thing I didn't like and which threw me out of the story a bit was that there's a really odd conversation justifying physical abuse of children, which was so out-of-keeping with the book as a whole which had some really great conversations around abuse, trauma, and difficult familial relationships; it just didn't make sense to me at all why this throwaway conversation should be included.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Murder, Child death, Drug abuse, Racism, Ableism, Violence, Bullying, Rape, Child abuse, Racial slurs, and Death
Moderate: Classism, Animal death, Alcoholism, and Death of parent