Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this eBook! This is a really good look into the problems that will occur from climate change and the possibilities that might arise from one person having way too much power. It is an amazing read for someone that likes dystopia but doesn't like violence and is more focused on how humanity would react to the impending end of the world.

I am planning to put out some social media content around this book because I feel like the ideas behind it are sound and I know I am going to be thinking about these characters for a long time.

I loved that this was a sapphic cli-fi book that focuses on ideas such as what makes a society and chosen family.

However where the book loses consistency for me is around 2/3 of the way in. As Jacqueline starts to lose her grip on her empire. I do fear Jaqueline but I feel like the book may have been better served if we got some first person perspectives. It felt by the end of the book that it moved too quickly to see Jaqueline vanquished and that also meant that some of the peripheral characters felt like loose ends.

I think that the overall concept for this book is good but the execution could have been better. In the end I am wondering if I am supposed to leave this book thinking it’s a commentary on an all female future, a cautionary tale against idols, a character study of a monolithic female billionaire, or a conspiracy about corporate America.

Perhaps this book is meant to be all those things, but as a result it does those things halfway.

This novel is truly engrossing. From the time I picked this book up I honestly did not want to put it down. I was shook! Of course, the setting of the book being in a very near future Earth, particularly NYC did not help at all. Gabrielle built a world and created an atmosphere of urgency that reflects the current state of our planet and showed a glimpse of what could potentially be our future.
The characters created have distinct qualities and although there were more than a few characters introduced, it was not hard to follow each ones narrative. This story does have a clear villain as far as moving the plot along but Korn definitely aptly includes the nuance of the human situation in the weaving of this story.
This book definitely hits all of the points for being a classic dystopian novel, but it is also very unique.
I cannot wait for book two!

I think the most human thing possible is trying something new under the mistaken impression that we're getting it perfect this time while we ignore the broken parts of the system that don't hurt us, specifically. And that's the tale this book tells as well. Will taking all the men out of society fix everything? Guess you'll just have to read this book and find out...

I really felt for the characters in this one and was enraged on their behalves. And yet it didn't feel supremely far away from the world we're currently living in where those with power take away the things they deem to be the problem and we watch as they get proven wrong time and time again. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

A fantastic and easy-to-follow utopian/dystopian think piece.

the premise of this book really intrigued me, but i'm not sure it accomplished everything i wanted it to. the characterization was really well done, everyone feels very real and well thought out, but the pacing and plotting kinda fell flat for me. most of this felt like an extended character study, so if you're a fan of minimum plot and maximum vibes you'll probably like it. the real plot didn't actually kick off until at least halfway through the book, and as a result it felt kinda rushed and the characters didn't get a chance to develop fully from what they went through. overall i think this would've benefitted from being a longer book for more time to explore plot and develop characters, but it does what it's trying to do well already. once i got past my initial struggle to get into the book, i went through the rest of it in a day; the second half is a very quick read. if you're looking for diverse scifi/spec fic that's not focused on male narratives, check this out.

arc provided by St. Martin's in exchange for an honest review

I received an ARC copy of this for review.

Overall this book was an easy and quick read for me. We follow the lives of three different queer women, as well as the journeys of their families, through the end of the world and one proposed solution to sustain human life. Without giving away spoilers, I think this book gives the reader a great quest in asking themselves under what contexts do your ethics change? What does it take to keep the human race alive once we have ruined the planet? and is there any power structure that is without inherent failure of the masses? If you are a dystopian lover, looking for a queer read that isn't about love, or pondering the what ifs of the climate crisis, this is a great read.

I gave this book four stars instead of five because as someone who is an environmental scientist I did struggle at times to get past the large scientific gaps, leaps, and errors the author made.

This is one of the more innovative works of fiction I've read recently. Korn is able to weave multiple perspectives seamlessly into an important and gripping dystopian and slightly sci-fi novel that also digs deep into identity and privilege issues that are some of the leading social issues of today.

Separate from the social and climate issues that are central to the story, the story alone could stand as a gripping post-apocalytic-esque novel. Korn's writing is deep, and literary where it needs to be, yet accessible and engaging when the story requires it. Seeing the story and the struggles from multiple perspectives is necessary to understand the impact that each character's decisions have on each other and on their immediate and more distant environments.

This will definitely be a high-demand book club worthy title when it publishes in December because of Gabrielle Korn's skillful balancing act between the fast-paced story and the surgical precision with which she dissects what it means to be a feminist, the effects of privilege in gender, race, status, and economy, the tension between capitalism and environmentalism, and the importance of finding the humanity within ourselves and within those around us.

Whoooo, what a ride. I love me a good dystopian novel and this seriously took me for a ride. And a good one at that! I loved the world that Gabrielle created and it had me from start to finish. You find yourself rooting for Ava, developing a growing resentment of Jacqueline, and pity for Olympia as you take this journey with them. I loved this and those of you who love dystopian societies where the good triumphs will love this too!

This is story that starts out in 2050 amidst global warming and extreme climate change. Jacqueline Millender is a wealthy businesswoman and inventor. She uses her wealth, prestige and genius to create a utopian sealed city. Jacqueline sends out questionnaires and applications to the US citizens to apply for admission to the “Inside”. Secretly she only selects educated feminist women to become new residents.

Ava, a scientist, is one of the new residents who leaves her girlfriend behind when only she is selected. Shelby leaves her poor family behind also after being selected to be Jacqueline’s assistant. Olympia is a new doctor and is also one of the chosen.

This book had several innovations and plot twists that I found very entertaining after getting past the beginning chapters. Korn describes a very realistic and scary future for humanity. And as a debut author she did a great job with this book.

I recommend this book to people who enjoy dystopian stories with a bit of romance thrown in.

ARC received from NetGalley for a voluntary and honest review.

Yours For The Taking by Gabrielle Korn is an exciting Sci-Fi fantasy book that I really enjoyed. It follows three characters with different backgrounds, whose stories come together in a future world that feels very real.

The story is set in the year 2050, where climate change has made life on Earth very difficult. The characters are relatable and diverse, with good LGBTQ representation.

The book's plot keeps you hooked, making it a great read, especially if you like Sci-Fi. I highly recommend Yours For The Taking for a thrilling and authentic Sci-Fi experience. (Linda)

*Full review to be added closer to publication date in December!*

Yours for the Taking is a stunning new sci-fi novel that kept me fully engaged throughout the entire story. I genuinely enjoyed Gabrielle Korn's writing and ability to craft such a unique, exciting, and thought-provoking story. There's a lot to explore with this book and I have a feeling it's going to be a hit for a lot of people. If you're looking for a new sci-fi to sink your teeth into this year, this is one you'll want to keep on your radar.

The future is female!

Dystopian books are my jam. Give me an end-of-the-world(-as-we-know-it) book, and I'm there. Fill it with an LGBTQIA+ cast? Cherry on top. This not-too-distantly futuristic sci-fi is reminiscent of Elysium or Divergent, with a hint of Handmaid's Tale, if you throw in The Truman Show.

By the 2050s, the earth has been neglected and damaged beyond repair. Unpredictable weather patterns batter the landscape, melting ice caps flood the coasts, and illness is rampant. To billionaire philanthropist Jacqueline Millender, the cause is obvious: men. The patriarchy has been in control for all history, and look where it's gotten us. So when the United World Government asked for her assistance with their new projects (six massive self-contained cities encased in metal and glass around the world), she used the opportunity to create a man-free New York. But in striving to save society from the patriarchy, is she creating an equally toxic environment?

A quote from an ending chapter puts it beautifully: "Equality is only scary if you have to give up power to attain it."

[This remainder of this review contains spoilers]

I love the premise of this, absolutely love the idea of making a self-sustaining city for future generations. I also love the dynamic of Inside-vs-Outside, the Chosen against the Left Behind. I think this story had a LOT of potential, especially spanning 20+ years. The first quarter of the book was intriguing; interesting characters, detailed descriptions of the world, relationships we could believe and become attached to. By the time Ava, one of the four main narratives, moved Inside, her characterization began to change. Sure, she was understandably depressed and poorly adapting to a world she hadn't expected. Adding to that is the obvious fact that some kind of mood-altering chemicals are being fed through the air systems, I wasn't too surprised or disappointed in this change. I just waited it out. Unfortunately, the switch back never came, and Ava stayed one-dimensional until the end.

Many parts of this book made me want to shake my phone and shout, "Show me! Don't tell!" Too many times we're things written out plainly, leaving nothing for the reader to parse together. I don't want to read, "She opened the email and what she read made her gasp," but would rather see what the email said, and gasp myself. The relationships felt just as flat, with sentences like, "she had friends; smart, interesting, funny friends," yet no characters to fit this "friend" category. Even the doctor, a strong, smart woman named Olympia, had nothing in her life besides heading the medical department: no friends, no relationships, no hobbies, for twenty years.

That brings me to another grievance: the characters spent twenty years inside a self-contained ecosystem, and yet we barely learn how it works. I'd love to have read about the division of labor, the lives of other residents, the how-to for different areas. Were the women trained in various trades, or were some selected based on their education and experience? What happened when things broke? Were there animals? Were there animals left outside? And then the same questions for the space station, where the billionaires went. Did the support staff just serve for 20 years without pause? Not to mention the rest of the world, where there were survivors. What did they eat? What was the landscape like? Outside of one small bartering community in the woods, we know nothing of the other survivors.

I really wanted to like this book. I'm giving it two stars because it's such an imaginative plot, and the world was well thought-out, just not well articulated. I had to force myself to finish it. I would be willing to read a revised version of it, but would likely not recommend it to a friend or re-read it as-is.

I feel like I read a different book than everyone else did. It was…fine. It's not a long book, but it often felt interminable. It has its moments (I was tickled by the portrayal of Gen Z as middle-aged parents lamenting "Aren't kids interested in socialism anymore?"), but on the whole I was underwhelmed.

This book has elements reminiscent of The Giver by Lois Lowry, Greenwood by Michael Christie, and the movie Snowpiercer, but all of them did it better. I think maybe cli-fi is just hard to do well without it feeling hokey or on the nose? In some ways, the imagined future in this book feels so plausible that it’s not even that interesting, it doesn’t feel that creative; it’s just like, yup, that’s probably what would happen.

The book is obviously interested in gender, but it doesn’t have particularly interesting things to say about gender. The discussion of gender is basically just Twitter discourse from 2018. This would be disappointing even if the book were set in 2018; it’s even more disappointing given that the book is set in the 2050s and later. If it has never occurred to you to think about how trans men factor into discussions of gendered oppression, then you may find some interesting ideas here. Everyone else will be like “sigh, this again? We just say ‘marginalized genders’ now.” The characters have essentially the same conversation that I remember people having on LiveJournal in 2010. If you're looking for a Torrey Peters-level discussion of gender, this book isn't even close.

The characters mostly feel under-developed. There are like six different POV characters, which means we don't spend enough time with any one character for me to really get to know them that well.

The prose and dialogue are sometimes stilted. At one point a character learns that something terrible has happened to her loved one, and she says, "What? No. That's awful. She must be so scared." (I heard this in the voice of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka saying "Stop, don't, come back" in a bored perfunctory tone.)

The last 10-15% feels rushed and facile. There's a whistleblower plotline, and I usually like stories about whistleblowers, but this one didn't feel satisfying. Everything happens too quickly and easily to be believable. It even feels kind of insulting to real-life whistleblowers, who are often fired, sued, harassed, etc. for speaking out.

I'm trying to think what kind of reader might like this book, and I guess it could be good for book clubs. It brings up obvious discussion questions like "What do you think an all-female society would be like?" or "What would you do if you were accepted to Inside but your loved ones weren't?"

This book is about consent. The effectual billionaire owner of this quasi utopian, planned society has lied from the start, got people there through fraud, keeps them wanting to be there through non-consensual drugging. The society was supposed to be egalitarian, diverse, and classless - but the initial people were all upper middle class women in their 20s-30s - and far fewer of them than advertised. Several pages were put into defining what is a man, woman, and who, precisely, would be permitted in this community. There are cliques, and only people in the same (assigned) job socialize with each other (openly), and there are groups who are not allowed to interact other than professionally.

Families are broken apart, heartlessly. Some find each other, through kismet.

A dictatorship is a dictatorship. A prison is still a prison even if it's very very comfortable. Lack of choice, even if it's in someone's idea of your best interest is not freedom. Cracks in the absolute control form, and attempts to maintain control appear.

There are realistic, relatable, GLBTIQ+ characters. I can relate to everyone there - even the "evil billionaire", who appears to want "the best" for the future - but ruthless in how she'll go about attaining it.

I would give this 6 stars if I could!

I struggled with this book, though I do still think it'll find its best readers who will really appreciate and enjoy it. This book feels like a beach ride that's sci fi and queer and satirical, and that's not a bad thing, but it didn't hit just right for me; I found the prose lacking on the line level, and the character-building uneven. I appreciated the humor, and the conceit, and of course, having queer characters front and center was a delight, but overall I was expecting something more literary. I also continue to feel stuck on a white writer writing from the perspective of a Black woman; on the one hand, with so many POVs, I understand the impulse to have a more diverse cast, but something about the delivery just felt uneasy to me, perhaps especially because it does interrogate race and politics for a Black woman's experience but written by a white person... I'm not a woc, so it's not my place ultimately to decide this or even have an opinion on it, but it's a discomfort that stayed with me throughout the book.

I wanted to love this book, and I didn’t. So let’s talk about that. Yours for the Taking is a feminist climate apocalypse dystopia that follows a number of women over 22+ years as they try to figure themselves out in a new and changing society. My biggest issue with this book is that despite the author saying it was a feminist book, despite the view points of the characters in the book suggesting it was a feminist book, it did not feel like a feminist book. But instead a white liberal feminist trying to be an ally, but showing herself not to be.

Featuring:
☆ A lot of queer women stuck in an enclosed dome together
☆ a girlboss gatekeep gaslight CEO trying to lead the feminist revolution
☆ a strong pro-environmentalism fuck capitalism thesis
☆ and a dystopia that will leave you on edge throughout the book.

So here’s the thing, every time any character mentions the idea of cis or trans women or gender inequality based on race, it felt like the author was spitting out the viewpoints that she thought she should have, but didn’t truly hold. Throughout the book we follow a number of diverse POVs over the course of the book, featuring many different type of women, however the POV the author really felt most comfortable in, was that of the cis white lesbian. Which makes sense for who the author is. In the end the content of what she was saying made her feel like an ally while the syntax and context they were used didn’t. It more often than not felt like she was adding in these things simply because she realised she had to. Most notably the book almost seems to come to this conclusion that a single person provided all the resources they need, could raise two children better than a collective. Which is a <i>weird</i> conclusion. In the end because of this gap between what the author was saying and what she believed, as well as her clear preference for Ava’s narrative, the writing overall felt lumpy and uneven.

This isn’t to say Korn isn’t a good writer either, she certainly is. Her pacing throughout the book is fantastic, and her style avoids the frills, but remains nevertheless engaging. The book extends far beyond the scope of what you would think given the description, but in all honesty it was great to read that far into the future and follow these women and see how things change over time. And while the POV’s of Shelby and Olympia lagged, when writing Ava, who because of how much better her POV was written, and how much other people talked about her, felt often times like the MC, it’s really fun to read. Ava is clearly trying to figure things out in a situation she doesn’t truly want to be in. She’s relatable and you can’t help but feel for her as she tries to find meaning in her life which, to her, has been stripped of meaning. Furthermore, the anti-capitalist pro-environment messaging works fantastically, with the final conclusion of the book being the same people who will try to save us, will be the people who caused it in the first place.

However this same core messaging is undercut by the fact that the author doesn’t give us this conclusion until about the final 1/3 of the book. Spoiler for what occurs: <spoiler>Specifically, we don’t find out that JM Inc made their money by fracking.</spoiler> And in all honesty these conclusions should’ve been made earlier in the book. Without it the setting of the book felt listless. About 90% of the book could’ve been set in literally any type of apocalypse and nothing would’ve had to change. Which somewhat further hammers down the issue of the books messaging not matching with its presentation. Why set it during a climate apocalypse? The book barely justifies it, and I really wish it had.

In the end Yours for the Taking was a book I was expecting to be a lot more meaningful and in depth than it was. It was full of plotholes, and more often than not felt like the author was paying lipservice to things she herself doesn’t believe. I suspect this book will play better with a white queer liberal audience, but I am not that audience.

Final Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ (5/10)

I had really high hopes for this one. Though it missed the mark a bit for me, it wouldn't deter me from recommending it to others. A lot is tackled here in what I guess is described best as Cli-Fi. While I did find it very interesting, the pacing seemed off to me which is where I struggled to maintain interest. Perhaps there was too much ? Maybe a smaller set of characters would have helped? Regardless, I appreciated the author's intent and it was a unique take on a dystopian future.

I went into this one thinking it would be an easy four or five star read for me, but it fell a bit flat and read more YA. The story itself was wild and intriguing but the character development, pace and story structure just wasn’t there and most scenes was rushed or repetitive. With more fleshed out characters and scenes, I think this would have been an easy five stars.

Ebook ARC provided through NetGalley
Rating: 2.5 stars

I didn't loooove this book. The premise was engaging, with the opportunity for only certain people to enter The Inside Project, a "series of weather-safe, city-sized structures" meant to protect inhabitants from environmental and humanitarian disaster, and some of the FMCs were engaging. there was a lot of queer and BIPOC representation, which I enjoyed, but often the plot dragged, and the many points of view that the story follows became confusing and convoluted. I had a hard time actually finishing this book because I didn't really care about most of the main characters.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and St Martin's Press for giving me an ARC of this book - I love that I had the chance to read it!

Gabrielle Korn really brings up some interesting themes with feminism and gender structure here, and I am all for books that bring these to the forefront.

I feel like Jacqueline and Olympia were both really well-developed characters. Ava, Brooke, and July could be developed a bit more in my opinion.

I also think a little more showing and not telling with characters would benefit the story.

A science editor would be fantastic prior to final publication. There are a a few medical inaccuracies here.

Overall, I did enjoy this book. It think it'll lead to some great discourse upon publication. I will be excited to see what the final published copy of this looks like!