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Formats
Paperback Details
  • 01/2022
  • 978-1-7374357-1-6
  • 560 pages
  • $
Ebook Details
  • 01/2022
  • 978-1-7374357-0-9
  • 560 pages
  • $3.99
E. C. Roderick
Author
Taken (Taken Series #1)
Matt was my husband. I was supposed to be with him for the rest of my life when the accident happened and took him away from me. I wouldn’t love anyone else. I believed. Until, I meet Leif. He tells me to trust him and to take my chance with him. Except, I’m his hostage. Not only am I his hostage, but time is holding me captive too, and I’m suddenly trapped in a world that is not mine. The year is 1756, and I am strangely in Massachusetts Bay Colony. War between Great Britain and France explodes across New England, and terrorizes the territory. I don’t know how I got here, and all I want to do is find a way home. But, the more time I’m stranded here, the more I spend time with Leif, and I am compelled toward him. Our lives are becoming inextricably entwined, and I’m afraid of losing everything that I once knew and loved. I begin questioning where I truly belong as I think of the life I left behind. I wonder if I’m going to withstand this, because all I know for certain is he is bound to my survival... and to the truth of why I’m here.
Plot/Idea: 10 out of 10
Originality: 10 out of 10
Prose: 9 out of 10
Character/Execution: 10 out of 10
Overall: 9.75 out of 10

Assessment:

Plot: A historical romance with a scifi twist, this is E.C. Roderick’s debut novel and the first in her proposed Taken series. Sylvie Arboles, a pediatrician based in LA, but traveling to the East Coast to visit her family for Christmas, lost her husband and infant “to an untimely death,” and now she is unexpectedly transported via a car accident and an earthquake to pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts Bay Colony where the British and French are at war. She is immediately taken captive, but soon proves her skills as a doctor. Sylvie’s inability to understand what has happened to her is one of the most compelling features of the novel, adding verisimilitude to a story that might otherwise just seem too fantastic to engage the reader. Sylvie must decide who she can trust and what the implications are of falling in love with someone from such a different timeline.

Prose/Style: With a middle school readability, this novel is easily accessible, but the author has added some unnecessary and distracting detail that slows down the 100,000-word story without adding to the understanding of the action or the characters.

Originality: E.C. Roderick has done an exceptional job of making this historical romance unique, first in the having the main character be a contemporary woman who time travels 275 years into the past.

Character Development/Execution: Sylvie is not quite sure who is delusional. It could be herself, or it could be that the other characters, dressed in costumes and re-enacting historical events, are taking themselves much too seriously. The reader is invited to share the tension this creates and to sympathize with Sylvie as she tries to figure out her situation. Sylvie must contend with all of this confusion at the same time as she is still grieving her husband and child and figuring out whether she can allow herself to love again.

Blurb: A historical romance with a scifi twist, Taken takes us into a world where two realities, that of twenty-first century widow and doctor Sylvie Arbole, and that of pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts Bay Colony where the British and French are at war, exist simultaneously.

Date Submitted: July 31, 2021

Formats
Paperback Details
  • 01/2022
  • 978-1-7374357-1-6
  • 560 pages
  • $
Ebook Details
  • 01/2022
  • 978-1-7374357-0-9
  • 560 pages
  • $3.99
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