Come with Me

A Novel

By: Helen Schulman

Narrated by: Sarah Naughton

Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

From Helen Schulman, the acclaimed author of the New York Times best-seller This Beautiful Life, comes another "gripping, potent, and blisteringly well-written story of family, dilemma, and consequence" (Elizabeth Gilbert) - a mind-bending novel set in Silicon Valley that challenges our modern constructs of attachment and love, purpose and fate.

One of Vogue’s books you won’t want to miss this fall 2018.

"What do you want to know?"

Amy Reed works part-time as a PR person for a tech start-up, run by her college roommate’s 19-year-old son, in Palo Alto, California. Donny is a baby genius, a junior at Stanford in his spare time. His play for fortune is an algorithm that may allow people access to their "multiverses" - all the planes on which their alternative life choices can be played out simultaneously - to see how the decisions they’ve made have shaped their lives.

Donny wants Amy to be his guinea pig. Even as she questions Donny’s theories and motives, Amy finds herself unable to resist the lure of the road(s) not taken. Who would she be if she had made different choices, loved different people? Where would she be now?

Amy’s husband, Dan - an unemployed, perhaps unemployable, print journalist - accepts a dare of his own, accompanying a seductive, award-winning photographer named Maryam on a trip to Fukushima, the Japanese city devastated by tsunami and meltdown. Collaborating with Maryam, Dan feels a renewed sense of excitement and possibility he hasn’t felt with his wife in a long time. But when crisis hits at home, the extent of Dan’s betrayal is exposed, and as Amy contemplates alternative lives, the couple must confront whether the distances between them in the here and now are irreconcilable.

Taking place over three nonconsecutive but vitally important days for Amy, Dan, and their three sons, Come with Me is searing, entertaining, and unexpected - a dark comedy that is ultimately both a deeply romantic love story and a vivid tapestry of modern life.

©2018 Helen Schulman (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers

What did I just read?

Weird, random, all over the place. Just when I thought it was getting good, it ended.

Not a smart sci-fi, as I was hoping

First of all, the recording quality was extremely poor. The talented narrator sounded like she was in a tin can. No matter how I listened (car, phone, ear buds, etc), it was terribly distracting. The author seems to be very talented but...The chapters were disjointed. They jumped all over the place without having a good connection. It was as if there were too many "good" ideas, so the author decided to include them all. The book wasn't really about anything in particular. Lastly, the teenage quasi-sex scene was unnecessarily graphic and way too long. Better luck next time.

Dan

I couldn’t stand Dan’s character. It ruined the whole story for me ! First negative review I have written!

A literary exploration of motherhood, technology, and fate.

I really enjoyed this book. Set in Silicon Valley, a woman caught in the crossfire of career and motherhood has the opportunity, through a surprising tech discovery, to explore all the ways her choices could have played out. Meanwhile other members of her family reckon with the ramifications of their own actions and responsibilities . It’s an exploration on technology, on destiny, and on love told with a creative narrative flexibility reminiscent of Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life.

Gripping, entertaining, chilling and fun!

Loved reading about Silicon Valley; the local haunts, stresses and challenges of the lifestyle and who we are(or could be) becoming.
Excellent narration and flow

Go With Her!

Schulman has written a stunner of a book about what it means to love in the digital age that is at once strikingly contemporary and absolutely timeless. Sentence after sentence oozes poetry (so much so that I often caught myself organizing stanzas in my mind’s eye). Alternatively reeling and gently swaying, starkly realistic and mesmerizingly dreamy, ‘Come with Me’ proffers its exquisite hand. Take it!

Come with Me

Where shall we go? The dominant question at the beginning of any story. In this one there are many trails to follow and, as in life, some lead to happiness, some to sorrow, some to ?. Thank you Helen Schulman for being my guide and to Sarah Naughton for voicing males and females, foreign and domestic.

Terrible!

This book lacks so many things - not to mention having multiple story points that were just cringe worthy... but I kept thinking and hoping that it would get better. I got to the last sentence and had to admit that hope was misplaced. If you want to kill some time with a bunch of not particularly relatable or likeable characters who were not growing or learning from their self centered decisions, then this book is for you. Otherwise, I suggest you check out other books / options to invest your time and money...

The most depressing thing I've read in 20 years

Absolutely awful! I tried to hang with it but just couldn't and I very rarely will quit a book once I start it. The writing was just okay, but the subject matter was the pits. Maybe it's just me, but if you are into teenage suicide, adultery, deviant sexual behavior, and possibly the grimmest view of today's society this side of Cormack McCarthy (though not even close to his writing chops), then knock yourself out. I couldn't finish this and it was actually a relief to delete it from my device. Good riddance!