Overview: This excellent new novel entitled The Taking, from author Dona Masi, tells a very suspenseful story of a girl besieged by strange events, the beguiling story line exploring what it means to confront the unknown.

Verdict: An unnatural silence and a feeling that you are all alone in the world. John and his daughter, Vera, grieve the loss of Vera’s mother, who mysteriously disappeared when Vera was a baby. As John struggles to raise his troubled daughter, he dismisses connections between his wife’s disappearance and Vera’s bizarre dreams of otherworldly creatures.

But when he finds Vera unconscious, lying in a ring of scorched trees, he begins to believe that a mysterious outside force is controlling her fate and his.

The Taking is a suspenseful story depicting a loving but difficult relationship between a father and daughter, amid the strange events that underlie their everyday life in a small New England town.

Tucked, seemingly at first, inconspicuously into this book as you begin reading it, is a most astutely told story that not only builds upon its tension in a layered manner, but one that becomes dutifully impassioned in such a way that the authors masterful creation of suspense and unexpectedness for the characters and the plot, is as impressive a feat as I have personally encountered in the past decade or so.

That character development blended with a genuine bringing of an angst-ridden, butterflies-affecting stance to those that read it, means what we get here in The Taking: A Novel is a story told, on the emotionally grounded surface, that heads in one direction, whilst the undercurrent silently, and yet with stealth, aches to reveal itself to be a rather compelling psychological thriller of the highest order.

About the Author - Dona Masi is a writer and editor whose short fiction and articles have been used in reading and writing assessments throughout the country. As a playwright, she has written plays that have been performed at the Provincetown Theater Company and on the Bon Mot radio program. When writing fiction or plays, she loves bringing characters to life and depicting them in all their humanity and heroism. She lives in Dover, NH.

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