** spoiler alert ** 
 Imagine that you're an ordinary teenager, having a debate with your dad about college... and in a flash, you're suddenly five years in the future. 
 Yes, it sounds kind of like "Flight of the Navigator," minus the spaceship. But Kimberly Derting pulls it off pretty well in "The Taking," a grim science-fiction tale about a girl who loses everything -- the parents she loved, the home she had, her beloved boyfriend -- when she vanishes for five years and reappears completely unchanged. Even weirder, she's not the same person she once was. 
 Kyra had the perfect life, with loving parents, her boyfriend Austin, and plans to attend college the next year. But during an argument with her father, she gets out of his car... and after a flash of light, he's vanished. 
 When she finally gets home, she finds that everything has changed. She's been missing for five years. Now her parents are divorced -- her mother has remarried and has a noisy toddler, while her father has become a desperate conspiracy theorist. Her boyfriend Austin is now in his twenties, and is dating Kyra's former best friend. And, awkwardly, she's now the same age as Austin's little brother Tyler, who clearly has a massive crush on her. 
 Even worse: she's also being followed by sinister dark-suited men from the NSA, and a mysterious boy with copper-colored eyes. As she learns more about what happened to her -- and the strange powers that these mysterious experiments have given her -- Kyra is forced to go on the run to avoid the NSA... and discovers that she may be a deadly threat to Tyler. 
 What happened in "The Taking" is pretty obvious from the beginning. A girl vanishes for five years? Blast of light? No memories of what happened? No aging? Body suddenly has super-strength and super-healing? Yup, it was pretty obviously aliens that took her, and it's not surprising that our dear benevolent government wants to capture her and pick her apart for samples. 
 The strong point of "The Taking" is the way Kimberly Derting handles this fairly cliched idea. The first half of "The Taking" is all about Kyra's struggles to adapt to her changed life -- and Derting carefully explores every altered relationship, and the awkwardness and irritation that people (like her mom) exhibit when forced to deal with her. The only bright spots are her encounters with Tyler, who keeps chalking elaborate designs on the street for her. 
 But the second half becomes an action-packed chase, with Tyler and Kyra on the run from the NSA with some other Returned. Oh, and by the way, the NSA doesn't deny its existence ("No Such Agency"), and it doesn't really deal with aliens. They're too busy snooping through your email and phone calls. 
 But the point is, the first half is slow and deliberate character development... and the second half is more of a sci-fi action movie, with Kyra investigating her own burgeoning powers and the mysterious agency out to snatch her. What ties these two halves together is the burgeoning romance between Tyler and Kyra, which is really quite sweet. When he isn't drawing little bridges between their houses, she's trying to save him from her toxic blood. 
 Kyra is a pretty ordinary girl, at least mentally -- she's understandably traumatized by the realization that everyone except her dad has effectively moved past her, and she feels like a stranger in the house she once lived in. Tyler is a rather sweet guy who is the only one to make her feel welcome, and Simon and his little gang beg further development in the sequel I'm sure is coming. 
 "The Taking" tackles a pretty cliched topic (alien abductions and Men In Black), but it does so with solid storytelling and well-developed characters. And it leaves the door wide open for more about the Returned.