Teen Tuesday and Audiobook Review: The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass

Image: Penguin Random House

The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass. Unabridged e-audio, ~8 hours. Read by Kevin R. Free and Michael Crouch. Listening Library/ Penguin Random House Audio, July, 2021. 9780593411513. (Review of downloadable audiobook borrowed from the public library.)

Happy Tuesday! It's pretty cold out there! The moon sure was pretty to watch though. Some strange critter or critters must have been in the neighborhood because the dogs were yanking me here and there to check out the scents. 

Teen Tuesday features The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass. Jake is a closeted junior at a mostly white private high school where his brother is the popular one and where he has to deal with micro-aggressions, overt racism and classism. He can't imagine how he'd be treated if he came out. He also can't imagine what would happen if people knew his other secret. He's a medium. He can see dead people-all around him, all the time. It's kind of hard to concentrate in math class when you can see ghosts stuck in their death loops. They're mostly harmless though. He's untrained and doesn't know how to control his power. Unfortunately, there's Sawyer, the sixteen-year-old who walked into his school the previous year and killed six people before killing himself. He's an angry ghost, opposite of harmless and out for revenge.

This dual-narrative switches between Jake's POV and Sawyer's journal entries. It's creepy and suspenseful and the horror is not limited to ghostly, but the real horror what real people can sometimes do to their fellow humans. If you're a mature teen who loves the horror genre, The Taking of Jake Livingston should be on your list of books to read.

Both narrators did a lot to bring this book to life. Kevin R. Free brought an earnest likability to Jake and Michael Crouch excels at portraying evil.