Author: Ann Brashares
Date of Publication: April 8, 2014
Formats Available: Hardcover, Paperback, E-book
Buy This Book: Amazon
Synopsis: An unforgettable epic romantic thriller about a girl from the future who might be able to save the world . . . if she lets go of the one thing she’s found to hold on to.
Follow the rules. Remember what happened. Never fall in love.
This is the story of seventeen-year-old Prenna James, who immigrated to New York when she was twelve. Except Prenna didn’t come from a different country. She came from a different time—a future where a mosquito-borne illness has mutated into a pandemic, killing millions and leaving the world in ruins.
Prenna and the others who escaped to the present day must follow a strict set of rules: never reveal where they’re from, never interfere with history, and never, ever be intimate with anyone outside their community. Prenna does as she’s told, believing she can help prevent the plague that will one day ravage the earth.
But everything changes when Prenna falls for Ethan Jarves.
From Ann Brashares, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, The Here and Now is thrilling, exhilarating, haunting, and heartbreaking—and a must-read novel of the year.
My Review:
It's been a long time since I read anything by Brashares but I remember really liking the Traveling Pants series so I had high hopes for this novel. Unfortunately The Here and Now lived up to none of them. I was extremely disappointed by this book, it was full of holes and the more I read the less this story seemed to make any kind of sense at all. With two-dimensional characters and a faulty plot, I just wasn't impressed by this novel.
The thing that drove me most insane was how absolutely stupid Prenna was. Throughout the novel there was a little part of me screaming "no" every single time she made a decision. Ethan was no better, and the romance between them made me cringe. I didn't feel any sort of connection between them and whenever they had an awkward conversation about how they wanted to be together I just couldn't take them seriously at all.
Not only that but absolutely nothing makes sense, nothing. First of all we never find out how Prenna traveled to the past and how exactly time travel works. Are they going back? Can they go back? Will they know if anything they did changed the future? We just don't know. Then logic in this book was all over the place, Prenna and Ethan look at a bunch of newspapers from the future and somehow they magically know what they need to do to save the world. How they figured this out I will never know, since they seem to have taken a bunch of unrelated events and somehow figured out the pivotal moment that would end up destroying the future.
Then when Prenna finally figures out what she needs to do to save the world she spends her time playing cards at the beach with Ethan. All they do is play cards, talk about sex, play cards, talk about how they can't be together, play cards; it is so unbelievably boring that there was seriously a point where I fell asleep reading this novel. The only exciting part was the end of the novel, where Prenna and Ethan finally find themselves in the conflict that is going to make or break the future. However, everything leading up to that moment was just plain boring, there's no two ways about it.
Even though this novel did have one exciting moment it wasn't enough to outweigh all of its faults. I really wanted to like this novel but I just can't say that I did. I still believe that Brashares is a good author, but science fiction just isn't the genre for her, I'm hoping for a better novel by her in the future!
2/5
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