Take Me There By Susane Colasanti

Take Me There by Susane Colasanti — A Practical Breakdown

The book follows Lily Callahan, a college freshman navigating love, identity, and her faith while dealing with a past relationship that never really ended. It's categorized as Christian fiction or inspirational romance, but honestly it reads more like a standard contemporary YA novel with a faith-friendly wrapper. Susane Colasanti has written a handful of titles in this space, and Take Me There is one of the more discussed ones, mostly because of the controversy around its content. The core premise is straightforward. Lily and her boyfriend at the start of the story, Trevor, broke up under complicated circumstances. She transfers colleges, meets a new guy named Cole, and everything that usually happens in a romance plot starts unfolding. The religious angle comes in through her upbringing and the pressure she feels about her choices. The book was pulled from some Christian bookstore shelves after it came out, which tells you something about how the line between "inspirational fiction" and regular teen drama got blurred here. I've had people ask me about this book in two contexts: teachers looking for curriculum material, and readers trying to figure out whether it's appropriate for younger teens. The short answer for the first group is that it works fine for high school English classes discussing themes of identity and peer pressure. The answer for parents is more complicated and depends entirely on what your household standards are.

The writing itself is serviceable. Colasanti isn't doing anything literary here. The prose is clean and functional, which is what you want in this genre. The characters are recognizable archetypes — the new girl trying to reinvent herself, the charming but emotionally unavailable love interest, the friend group that exists mainly to deliver exposition. Nothing groundbreaking, but it moves at a decent pace and most readers finish it in a couple of evenings. One thing people miss when they're deciding whether to read or assign this book is the structural choice Colasanti makes with the timeline. The first half takes place almost entirely in Lily's memories of her high school relationship with Trevor, and the second half shifts to her college present with Cole. This creates a weird narrative imbalance where Trevor dominates the emotional weight of the story even though he's not the point of the plot. I've seen classroom discussions fall apart around this because students end up rooting for the relationship that already ended instead of engaging with what the book is actually trying to say about moving forward. If you're looking to download or purchase a copy, the book is available through standard retailers like Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Christianbook.com. It's also frequently found in paperback at college bookstores and major chain stores. Some library systems carry it, though I've noticed circulation varies because churches and school districts have flagged it for review. The ISBN for the paperback edition is 978-1599902586 if you need it for ordering or course reserves.

Here's the thing that doesn't get mentioned enough in reviews: the book's handling of consent and emotional manipulation is more problematic than most summaries let on. Trevor, the ex-boyfriend, displays several red-flag behaviors — guilt-tripping, isolation tactics, using religion as control. The narrative frames these partially as symptoms of his own brokenness, which is fair, but it also romanticizes them to a degree that younger readers may not have the tools to critically evaluate. I've had students in discussion groups who genuinely struggled to separate "he's a bad guy who needs help" from "this is what love looks like." For educators who want to use this text, I'd recommend pairing it with supplementary material on healthy relationships and emotional abuse. Don't assume students will pick up on those dynamics on their own. A twenty-minute conversation about the difference between passion and control before you start chapter one makes a real difference in how the class engages with the material. The romantic subplot with Cole is where the book tries hardest to align with its stated values, but it stumbles in its own way. Cole is written as the morally upright alternative to Trevor, which sounds fine on paper but comes across as a thin virtue-signaling exercise in practice. His character lacks any meaningful internal conflict or growth arc. He's correct opinions without complexity, which makes him less of a person and more of a messaging vehicle. That's a structural weakness that undermines whatever thematic point the book is making about choosing wisely.

Colasanti does handle Lily's faith journey with more nuance than the marketing copy suggests. She doesn't present religion as a simple answer or a moral shield. Lily's beliefs are shown as genuinely complex — they comfort her and they constrain her, sometimes at the same time. That tension is the book's strongest element, and it's where the writing is most honest. If you're reading this for the spiritual content rather than the romance, that's probably where you'll find it. The ending is satisfying in a conventional sense but raises questions the book never follows up on. Lily makes a choice about her future and her relationships, and it lands somewhere reasonable, but several plot threads are just left dangling. The Trevor situation in particular gets wrapped up too quickly for the amount of time the book spent establishing him as the emotional center. It feels like the author knew the story needed to move toward a resolution but wasn't sure how to get there without undermining her own setup. Readers looking for something deeper in this genre might prefer Colasanti's Other Side of the Story or Even After, which tackle similar themes with more developed character work. Take Me There is fine as a quick read, but it's not her strongest work and it has enough loose ends and problematic elements that you should go into it with clear expectations about what you're getting.