"The Future of Us", by Carolyn Mackler and Jay Asher, is about two high school students and ex-best friends who discover modern-day Facebook on an early internet browser in 1996. Personally, I thought this was a great book that commented on the almost obsession teenagers have with social networking today. I thought that a theme in the book was that teens and kids shouldn't worry so much about the future, and live in today.
For instance, one of the main conflicts (or conflict starters? I don't know) in the book was that the character, Emma, is messing with the time stream, changing things about her life that she doesn't like, such as her husbands, her job, even small things like where she lives. She makes unwarranted assumptions about the future based on 420 characters or less wall posts. She experiments with the small changes, or 'ripples', in her time to the Facebook's future because she's insanely concerned about having a perfect life in the future. Now I don't know much about college applications, which I can assume are much more stressful than high school applications, but I can relate to stress over the future. So many kids in my grade and really riding on one specific high school they want to go to, or freaking out over hypothetically not getting into a high school (not saying that I'm not), and I think "The Future of Us" is trying to say that you can still have a happy life if not everything goes exactly the way you want it to.
For instance, one of the main conflicts (or conflict starters? I don't know) in the book was that the character, Emma, is messing with the time stream, changing things about her life that she doesn't like, such as her husbands, her job, even small things like where she lives. She makes unwarranted assumptions about the future based on 420 characters or less wall posts. She experiments with the small changes, or 'ripples', in her time to the Facebook's future because she's insanely concerned about having a perfect life in the future. Now I don't know much about college applications, which I can assume are much more stressful than high school applications, but I can relate to stress over the future. So many kids in my grade and really riding on one specific high school they want to go to, or freaking out over hypothetically not getting into a high school (not saying that I'm not), and I think "The Future of Us" is trying to say that you can still have a happy life if not everything goes exactly the way you want it to.
The book also says something about spending too much time on the internet, which is pretty funny, because the book is set in 1996, and the problem is really massive in 2012.
I think this book was great, and had a nice mix of romance and great concept, as so many seemingly cool books get lost in sappy love triangles and obsessive girlfriends these days. Jay Asher is the bomb, and I'm definitely more interested in checking out Carolyn Mackler's books.
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