SuitabookThe Taking of Jake Livingston
Ryan Douglass
- Reading
- Consider checking in before and during reading about reactions to the darker material. If particular warnings matter, discuss them beforehand; the ending and the treatment of several themes remain unclear.
- Themes
- Identity and self-possession: Jake’s supernatural experience is connected with social exposure, private fear and the possibility that another force may control or erase aspects of him. The premise supports discussion of identity and agency, but the book’s ultimate judgement about these pressures is not established.
- Race, belonging and social exposure: Jake is one of the only Black pupils at St Clair Prep and is described as struggling to fit in while facing social and supernatural pressures. The book’s stance on this remains unclear.
- Violence and haunting: Jake encounters Sawyer, a teenager who killed six pupils at a local school before dying by suicide and later becomes a powerful, vengeful ghost. The premise places mass violence and revenge inside a supernatural horror structure, but does not establish whether the story condemns, explains or meaningfully resolves Sawyer’s violence.
- Worth knowing
- Approach it as intense horror, not merely a ghost story. The book includes graphic bodily imagery and serious threats involving violence, abuse, racism, sexual harm, suicide and loss of autonomy.