Book Review :: The Taker, by Alma Katsu

The Taker by Alma Katsu
Published by Random House
on September 6th 2011
Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 436
Goodreads

Have you ever loved someone so much that you'd do anything for them?

When Dr Luke Findley turns up to his hospital shift in the small town of St Andrews, Maine, he's expecting just another evening of minor injuries and domestic disputes. But instead, Lanore McIlvrae walks into his life - and changes it forever. For Lanny is a woman with a past...

Lanny McIlvrae is unlike anyone Luke has ever met. Hers is a story of love and betrayal that defies time and transcends mortality - and cannot end until Lanny's demons are finally put to rest. Her two hundred years on this earth have seen her seduced by both decadence and brutality - but through it all she has stayed true to the one true love of her life. Until now.

Last updated on 19 January 2022

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My thoughts on The Taker, by Alma Katsu

So you may recall I bought this book from the opshop a few weeks ago because a) it was cheap, b) it said ‘an immortal love story’ on the front, and who can resist that? and c) the cover was cool. But I’ve just finished reading it and well…what can I say? The Taker, by Alma Katsu, didn’t live up to it’s pretty cover.

In short, leaving out all the weird and almost disturbing parts, it’s about…wait. First, just let me say that I don’t really know who it’s about. There’s Luke Findley, a Doctor in a town called St Andrews, Maine, and he meets Lanore ‘Lanny’ McIlvrae in the present day, and she says that she’s just killed someone and needs to run away. Sounds thrilling already, right? WRONG! He helps her escape from the police after he discovers that she can’t die, and as they run away, going from hotel to hotel, stealing a car and generally avoiding everyone, Lanore tells Luke the story of how she became immortal.

Ah. Vampires, you’re thinking right? WRONG!

Not vampires at all! Nope. Which, at first, I thought ‘yes, okay, great! I story about someone who can’t die, but who doesn’t have to suck blood! Fantastic!’ but then it got weird.

Lanore’s story starts off and she lives in St Andrews, but in 1809, and she’s in love with a boy called Jonathan. She gets pregant outside of marriage and her parents send her away to Boston to a Convent, but on the way, she gets invited to a Count’s house, and there she meets Adair, who is immortal and keeps immortal company.

He gives her a potion and she becomes immortal, so she can’t go back to her home ever (and she miscarriages so doesn’t have a baby to look after) . But the three years later, Adair decides he needs to meet this famous Jonathan that she tried to hide from him, but whom he eventually realised existed. She goes to get Jonathan from Maine, makes him immortal. Eventually, after finally being fed up with Adair’s games and horrific actions, Lanny and Jonathan do something to him (won’t tell you in case you actually want to read this), and they run away. Meanwhile, Lanny in present-day is running away with Luke and telling this story. I won’t tell you any more, but basically it’s all a bit weird and a bit well…gross in parts.

It was written quite well, despite the weirdness of it – except that in present-day it’s all in the third person, which is fine (in the past in Lanore’s story it’s all first-person), but it’s worded like ‘Luke walks across the room’, ‘Lanny picks up the envelope’…you know like it’s happening right now. And I don’t like that. But I’m probably just fussy.

I’ve given it a two-star, because even though I didn’t really like it overall, and I think that a few chapters at the end were unnecessary, there were parts that were actually exciting and I wanted to keep reading. These were few, but never-the-less, they were okay.

But don’t let me tell you what to think about it. If you want to read it for yourself, go ahead. Let me know what you thought of it. In the meantime, I think I actually might return it to the opshop – which is extreme because I never do that.