In Norah McClintock’s latest teen crime novel, a lot of bad things happen to high-schooler Stephanie Rawls. Stephanie lives with her mother in a small town in Ontario, where a serial killer targeting teenage girls is on the loose. Her father, a nuclear engineer, died in a traffic accident a few years ago, and now her mother has taken up with an underachieving local named Gregg. Stephanie hates Gregg.

One evening while walking home, Stephanie is drugged and abducted by an unseen assailant. She wakes up hog-tied in an old cabin deep in the woods, her abductor nowhere in sight. Stephanie escapes and, as she treks back to civilization over the next five days, must use a host of backwoods skills taught to her by her late grandfather.

McClintock paints a frightening picture of Stephanie’s lonely ordeal, piling on one challenge after another: thirst, hunger, rain, nightfall, panic, injury, illness, and wild animals. Stephanie’s journey makes up the bulk of the book, and teens interested in the great outdoors will be fascinated to learn survival skills from her, such as how to make a compass using a stick, the sun, and a wristwatch; how to collect morning dew and rainwater for drinking; how to read the stars at night to find magnetic North; how to find unlikely sources of food; how to stave off panic; and how to deal with bears.

The novel could have used a touch more suspense, and because the cast of characters is quite small, smart readers will easily figure out who the culprit is.

Nonetheless, Taken is an engrossing study of the humbling effects of solitude, and it offers an unflinching depiction of the unforgiving and often brutal realities of the natural world.