The Taking Books in Order

The Taking is Melissa West's young adult science fiction romance series, and it starts with one rule that tells you almost everything about the world: do not peek. In this future, humans live under the watch of alien visitors, and seventeen-year-old Ari Alexander breaks the rule the night she sees Jackson Locke hovering over her bed. From there, Gravity, Hover, and Collide build a story that mixes romance, war, political control, and survival, while Surge reaches back to the earlier days of the conflict.

Ari is the clear center of the main trilogy. She is not an ordinary bystander who gets swept into trouble by accident. She comes from a military family, has been trained by her father, and knows more about strategy and power than most people around her. That makes her a strong match for Jackson, who begins as the arrogant boy she least expects to trust and then becomes the person who forces her to question everything she has been taught about his kind. Gravity works because the attraction is real, but so is the danger of choosing the wrong side.

By Hover, the scope opens up. Ari and Jackson are no longer dealing with secrets in bedrooms and hallways. They are facing life on Loge, where humans who escaped Earth discover that survival may come at the cost of freedom. The second book leans harder into the series' dystopian side. Alliances get shakier, the world grows stranger, and the romance has to hold up under pressure that is political as much as personal.

Then the war gets bigger.

Collide pushes the story back toward Earth and into final-battle territory. Ari has survived world war, shifting loyalties, and more than one betrayal, but the hardest choice may be what she is willing to become in order to stop Zeus and protect the people she loves. The series keeps asking the same hard question in different forms: when every option costs something, what kind of sacrifice can you live with? That gives the books momentum beyond the love story, even though the love story remains a major part of the appeal.

Surge adds a useful extra angle because it moves earlier in the timeline and follows Val Stone and Randolf "Rolf" Cartier during the arrival of the Ancients on Earth. Instead of simply expanding lore for its own sake, it shows how fear, prophecy, and manipulation were built into this world from the start. If the trilogy is about living inside a broken system, the prequel is about how that system got made.

Expect fast pacing, big reveals, and a lot of romantic tension threaded through a war story. West keeps the language accessible and the stakes emotional, which makes the series easy to move through even when the world gets complicated. If you like YA science fiction that puts kissing, loyalty, and impossible decisions in the same room, The Taking is the place to start.