When a blood-covered young woman is brought into a rural Maine emergency room, Dr. Luke Findley thinks it's just another case of woman gone mad. However, it's much more than that, and so begins the autobiographical flashback that is The Taker.
The narrator is 200-year-old Lanny, and the police think she murdered someone in the forest nearby. She asks Luke to help her escape, and in order to make him believe she's other than the usual psychopath, she cuts herself. Miraculously, the cut immediately heals. From there, Lanny tells her story, and the rest of the book vaults between present and past.
The Taker is Katsu's debut, and she is a spellbinding writer. Her prose is so beautiful, it makes you ache. Yet, there are missed opportunities involving character development, plot twists and creep factor. The most obvious problem is Lanny's eternal love for her childhood friend Jonathan, an unappealingly weak and self-centered character.
Katsu's debut has a promising opening and an interesting middle, but an ending that is less than spectacular. A writer with as much technical skill as Katsu will surely publish again; we hope she finds a story truly worthy of her exceptional voice. --Sara Dobie, blogger at Wordpress