Tara Altebrando

United by the requirement to take care of a mysterious, electronic cube, Eden, Eli, Marwan, and Ilanka are driven ever further apart, and disobeying the device has life-threatening consequences.

Take Me With You

trixie

anticlimactic AND i didn’t get my endgame 😒

Sven Test

The premise is definitely intriguing. It hooked me enough to want to find out what was happening. But I guess I expected more. The wow factor wasn’t there for me. RTC

Genesis (@whisperingchapters)

Shannon Jade

In Take Me With You by Tara Altebrando, nothing is ever as it seems, and an AI cube has the power to change the lives of the four high school students who find and must take care of it. With the stakes rising ever higher, this novel is a fast-paced YA read with plenty of twists and turns to keep you on your toes.

Set in a US high school just a little way in the future, Take Me With You builds a realistic yet vaguely futuristic world in which AI has capabilities none of its characters know how to navigate. Tara Altebrando uses projected technologies that are advanced enough to offer something new and innovative yet familiar enough to seem realistic and relatable. This book is a page turner, and a lot of that comes down to the fact that it is written to feel believable.

Take Me With You features an excellent diverse cast, and this diversity is an important part of the story. Told from the rotating perspectives of Eden, Eli, Marwan, and Ilanka, this book offers glimpses into four very different personalities and lives. The chosen four work together to hide and protect the device, all while keeping up with its worrying involvement in their lives and its ever-growing list of rules, lest disobedience lead to life-threatening consequences. Along the way, Take Me With You’s characters must also face a range of other struggles—xenophobia, grief, isolation, family pressures. In this fast-paced story, there’s something new on every page.

Take Me With You is a commentary on social media and technological control. It also features themes of friendship, discrimination, loss, and self-discovery. I’d recommend Take Me With You to fans of Indigo Owl by Charlie Archbold.

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"Repeatedly surprising and genuinely chilling." - E. Lockhart, bestselling author of We Were Liars and Genuine Fraud From the acclaimed author of The Leaving comes a new psychological thriller that challenges our trust in the electronic devices we keep close. Eden, Eli, Marwan, and Ilanka barely know each other beyond having a class or two together. But when they are all summoned via messaging app to an empty classroom after school, they find a small cube sitting on a desk. Its sides light up with rules for them: Do not tell anyone about the device. Never leave the device unattended. And then, Take me with you . . . or else. At first they think it's some kind of prank or a social experiment orchestrated by the school administration. Still, they follow its instructions until the newly-formed group starts to splinter. Nobody has time for these games--their lives are complicated enough. But the device seems increasingly invested in the private details of their lives. And disobeying its rules has scary--even life-threatening--consequences . . . This timely thriller probes our dependence on personal technology and challenges the notion that our devices are keeping us connected. The truth may very well be the opposite.

Take Me With You

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