We’ve Come To Take You Home

We’ve Come To Take You Home by Susan Gandar

Meet Sam. She’s a normal teen with loud friends, boys she’s not so sure of, and parents who can’t seem to get along. She’s worried about her parents, but Sam’s real problem? She’s blacking out. She has no control over when and where it happens. It could be day or night. She could be alone or talking to someone. It’s even happened when she was running. All she knows is that when she blacks out, she’s in a different time and place that she doesn’t recognize.

Meet Jess. She’s pretty normal too with dreams, hopes, and fears. Only Jess lives in a frighteningly brutal time where war, pain, and death were more common than bread. She deals with daily horror, but learns to live in it and still is able to see the kindness and beauty attached to her dark world.

We’ve Come To Take You Home is a story of how the lives of Sam and Jess collide. The two of them could not be more different, yet their stories are incredibly familiar. Sam is a petulant teen whose parents are on the brink of a breakup while Jess is constantly confronted with starvation. It doesn’t seem like these two girls have anything in common, but as the story progresses it reveals that they are very much the same girl. Gandar does a fantastic job intertwining these stories vividly and in a compelling way that keeps the reader intrigued and engrossed.

I felt everything that the author wrote: the sound of a loud engine from the low-flying planes, to the excruciating pain of childbirth, to freezing bare feet running on pavement. I was excited every day to read a new page and learn a little more about these characters. This book is not a who-done-it, but more so a why-done-it and the answers are given to the reader on the last few pages.

The only drawback one might find is working a little harder to keep up with the characters because the point of view switched so often, though I found it interesting.