The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass

 

Welcome Back, Booklovers! I'm back with another YA book and this time it's a horror novel. Horror is not my usual genre and horror is on the come up in YA lately so more titles are appearing. I was ready to read this one when I saw a trailer back in January of 2020. And then it kept getting pushed back so glad to finally see it make it's debut into the world. I would also like to preface this review by saying Ryan and I are Twitter friends but this is still an honest review. I received an arc from Penguin Random House for review.

As if the teenage years weren't hard enough Jake has to battle fitting in at his private school and the literal ghosts that haunt him. I like how we were thrown into Jake's life of ghosts on death loop and navigating a world between worlds. We don't get the completely backstory about how Jake found out he is a medium. He's reluctantly settled into the role by now and is doing his best to ignore it. This is just one thing left to label him by and his family and friends just don't seem to understand. The descriptions of the dream-like state he's in provided the right amount of creepy and mystifying. 

Sawyer is a deranged killer and his POV shows us how he ended up enacting a school shooting. As he still haunts this world he starts to attack some of the students from his school he had vendettas with but didn't get the chance to kill. Jake's neighbor Matteo happens to be one of them and Jake ends up enduring Sawyer's wrath. We as readers are inside his head flipping through pages of his diary. What was even scarier was the similarities between him and Jake. Jake himself notes how their stories start to take similar paths. These chapters did a good job at showing Sawyer's motives in a believable way that didn't make him cartoonishly evil. But they also aren't asking you to excuse his actions either.

Whenever there were scenes at Jake's fancy Catholic school I got flashbacks to my own time. Walking down the hallways in those navy blue sweaters, being one of a handful of Black kids in the entire school and the racist teacher picking on you for no reason at all. While Jake is more passive when it comes to dealing with navigating the very white school environment his brother Benji takes charge and isn't afraid to stand up to the racists. And unlike Jake he has found his place. 

This is actually what I was hoping a recent read would give me but fell kind of flat with. Jake is queer and struggling with coming to terms with his sexuality. And as we know in the Black community there's a stigma about Black male masculinity. So it was nice to see him explore his identity. He has complicated relationships with his mother and brother where the love is there but also resentment.  I enjoyed how that was explored throughout and tied into how he feels comfortable in his identities.

This book manages to be dark, creepy, and fast-paced. It never lags like some of my more recent thriller reads. Nor does it overextend itself and I appreciate a story that can cover some ground without being too lengthy. And in between everything going on with Sawyer he's able to make friends at school and find brief moments of levity that balance out the darkness of this story. This book also has a very teen voice which I appreciated because I think it will allow it's target audience to connect better while it also addresses complex topics.