Autonomous
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
William Mackler is about to go on the road trip of a lifetime. After winning a contest—and nearly dying in the process—he becomes the proud owner of Autonomous, a driverless car that knows where you want to go before you do. #Worthit! To sweeten the deal he gets to pick three friends to go with him on a cross-country trip. For William, a reckless adrenaline junkie, this is the perfect last hurrah before he and his friends go their separate ways after graduation. But Autonomous is more than just a car without a steering wheel. It's capable of downloading all of the passengers' digital history—from the good, to the bad, to the humiliating. The information is customized into an itinerary that will expose a few well-kept secrets, but it will also force William to face some inner demons of his own. Think you know Autonomous? The real question is, how much does Autonomous know about you? This funny, tense, action-packed thriller combines topical social-media-privacy stakes with jaw-dropping high-tech action for a road trip saga like no other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Recent high school graduate William Mackler has one goal: to win Autonomous (a self-driving, fully-automated luxury vehicle worth millions) and take his three best friends on the road trip of a lifetime to Moonshadow, a Burning Man like festival in Arizona. He wins the contest, but William and his friends Melissa, Christina, and Daniel are all hiding things, secrets that reveal themselves as the car, dubbed Otto, becomes more and more independent. In a fast-paced, tech-saturated, and thoroughly hashtagged road trip story, Marino (Uncrashable Dakota) looks at the potentially insidious side of artificial intelligence and highlights how friendships change as people grow up. He does an excellent job of focusing on what makes William and his friends human they are imperfect, and no single rule is ever set in stone ("We taught how to be a dick just by being ourselves," William realizes as the trip goes haywire). Otto can't quite wrap its processing unit around these facts the nuances of what makes humans human aren't imitable, even if Otto learns to tell a good joke or two. Ages 14 up.
