Kidnapped! Taken by Edward Bloor

It's 2035, and in South Florida, where the uber-wealthy are concentrated in vast gated communities, kidnapping is second only to real estate as a growth industry.

Charity Meyers, only child of Dr. Jerome Meyers, famed dermatologist-inventor of Derma-Bronze, which has made deep tans safe and universal, is an eighth-grader, escorted by their armed faux-English butler Albert to and from her exclusive satschool where she attends with a handful of equally privileged students. Despite her wealth and privilege, life for Charity is limited to her close relationship with her maid Victoria, really her surrogate mother, who lets her help in the kitchen when her father and ex-stepmother are away, and her school friend Patience, with whom she shares dissatisfaction with her circumscribed life. For her schoolmates, shopping is limited to "satstores," and field trips are taken only under armed guard in an armored bus. Their parents' fears and overprotection are only reinforced when one of her classmates has an ear amputated when he is "taken."

So when Charity struggles back to consciousness and finds herself groggy and strapped to a gurney inside a disguised ambulance van, she knows that she, too, has somehow been abducted. As she tries to remain calm and wait for her ransom, Charity attempts to talk with her guard, a strangely well-educated young Haitian immigrant who calls himself Dessi. Although Dessi cynically describes kidnapping as a routine method of income redistribution in their post-credit crash world, the two young people learn that they share a bond in their grief for the early loss of their mothers. As Charity waits out the negotiations for her release, she gradually discovers that her protector Albert is himself one of the abductors.

Charity learns from Dessi that her father is scheduled to deliver her ransom by a midnight drop from his private helicopter, but to her horror as she watches on her vidscreen, the helicopter crashes and burns with her father aboard. Plan B for her kidnappers requires her ex-stepmother Mickie to deliver currency to the abductors, but in a foreshadowed but surprising plot twist which will blindside most readers, Charity discovers that almost no one is her life is what she believes him or her to be.

Edward Bloor's Taken is a tightly written thriller which will keep young adult readers racing through the book. His carefully developed characters and setting provide them with a less-than optimistic look at the near future in a society in which rich and poor live vastly different lives and in which the fight to get and hold onto currency has become the central fact of life. A worthy sequel to Bloor's acclaimed middle school novel Tangerine, this novel shares with Bloor's first novel a compelling combination of keen social awareness and skillfully suspenseful writing.