Title: The Future of UsAuthor: Jay Asher & Carolyn Mackler
Age Group: Teens
# of Pages: 356
My Rating: 4.5/5
It's 1996 and the internet is not yet wildly used. Emma receives a new computer from her father so her friend Josh gives her the new AOL CD-ROM to install. After Emma installs the program, she lands on a page called Facebook. Except, Facebook is not yet invented!
Emma can see her profile from the future with details of her life in snippets. After getting over the initial shock, she sees this as a chance to fix her future! Josh worries that she may be messing up their future completely by attempting to correct the little things in the present.
It's rare for me these days to request a novel to review because I have a huge TBR pile and am so busy these days. But when I skimmed the synopsis of this novel, I had to read it! I was looking forward to the end result before I even started!
What I found to be amusing was that Emma took everything from Facebook that her future self wrote so seriously. I know for a fact that when I complain about something on Facebook, it really is not a big deal as it sounds. Even if it is, it's not like my world is coming to an end. But Emma doesn't understand that and takes everything for word. She attempts to avoid one of her future husbands by tracking him down and decide not go to the university that he goes to. The more paranoid she got, the more I started to get irritated with her character. I supported Josh's stance on leaving it all alone. However, his future is that he would get married to the prettiest girl in the school and have a successful life. So I could understand that Emma criticized him because he might not want to ruin his perfect future.
I very much enjoyed this novel because it has such a unique concept. I always wanted to have a glimpse of my future to see what it is like if I am going at the pace I am right now. I think people would find this novel appealing because of the overall idea of being able to alter your future if you know exactly what will happen. I know I would be a hypocrite and say I won't, but I am pretty sure I would tweak somethings here and there.
The one thing that kept this novel from a 5/5 rating is [MINOR SPOILER ALERT] the fact that it doesn't reveal the future of either characters at the very end. I was so peeved! I was hoping that in the future once Facebook did come out for Emma and Josh, they would go on it. Then the story would end with Emma or Josh updating something that concludes everything. But, unfortunately not. [SPOILER ENDS]
I think this is a fun and non-cliche novel that anyone (especially for those who lived through 90s and uses Facebook today) can read.
Review copy provided by Penguin Group Canada.
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