The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler

Emma, a high school student in 1996, has just received a computer from her father. Her best friend Josh, who lives in the house next to hers, has an America Online CD-ROM that he offers her. When she finished downloading it, she discovers Facebook in her list of favorite sites. Clicking on it, she discovers her Facebook page 15 years in the future. To her dismay, she sees herself as being miserably unhappy. She messes around with her life, desperately doing anything to prevent her unfortunate future. She decides to apply to different colleges so that she won't meet her future husband, but everything she does just seems to make a different future in which she is still unhappy. Josh, on the other hand, is extremely happy with his future, and he's terrified that something Emma does will mess it up.

It's definitely a cool idea, but the book did not execute it well. It turned into one of those books that's about high school kids, who they want to go out with, and all the other tiny things they do in their life. The future Facebook added an interesting element, but Emma ended up rushing home every day to check it, and ended up acting like kids do now, so it didn't seem different than the other books about a random high school kid. The idea wasted away as the book progressed, so by the end, it had lost any novelty that it had at the beginning.

The book is a 1.9. It's better than some books I've read, but not nearly as good as many others. Like Splenda, it seemed sweet at first, but quickly lost its appeal, and there are alternatives that are better.

Nhận xét

The Princess Who Flew with Dragons, by Stephanie Burgis

I still am busily reading elementary/middle grade speculative fiction a in my roles as a judge for the Cybils Awards (mainly going back to re-read things I read early last year), but I am in good enough shape that I treated myself one dreary day last week to a shiny and new and much anticipated book-- The Princess Who Flew with Dragons , by Stephanie Burgis (Bloomsbury, November 2019). This is the third in the series that began with The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart (link to my review), and it's possibly the one I enjoyed most. I certainly think it was the fastest read; it was a (more or less) single-sitting of about an hour read for me (when I like a book and need to know what's going to happen next, I read faster, and it was relatively short-- 216 pages). Princess Sophia, who we met in Book 2, The Girl with a Dragon Heart , is the main character here, and when her story begins, she's being sent by her older sister, the ruling princess, to a distant city to attend a Worl...

Đọc thêm

The Owls Have Come to Take Us Away, by Ronald L. Smith (review and interview)

I first had the pleasure of meeting Ronald L. Smith at Kidlitcon back in 2015 (PSA--come to Kidlitcon 2020 in Ann Arbor next March!). His first middle grade book, Hoodoo, a tale of supernatural horror in the south, had just been published, and I enjoyed it very much ( my review ). I likewise enjoyed The Mesmerist (2017), about kids fighting evil in 19th century London ( my review ). I never reviewed Black Panther: the Young Prince (2018)….someday I will. So in any event, I was very excited about his most recent book, The Owls Have Come to Take Us Away (Clarion Books, February 2019). This is the story of an air force kid, Simon, son of a black mom and a white dad, who's obsessed with aliens. He's convinced owl-like aliens have arrived, watching and experimenting on humans. His family has no time or patience for aliens, so Simon is alone with his fears of the Grays, as he calls them. When something very strange happens on a camping trip with hi...

Đọc thêm

The Clockwork Ghost (York, book 2), by Laura Ruby

The Clockwork Ghost , by Laura Ruby (middle grade/YA, Walden Pond Press, May 15 2019), continues the adventure begun in The Shadow Ciphe r without missing a beat. Twins Tess and Theo, and their friend Jaime, are still following a twisting trail of impossible clues through an alternate New York of mechanical marvels. They still have more questions than they have answers. And they still have enemies, most notably a nasty piece of work and his henchwomen who want to eliminate the threat they might pose to greedy plans to revamp the city. There's no point in recapping the story. It is a dream of puzzles and ciphers and mechanical machinations as clues are found and followed. And it is a very bright and vivid sort of dream, that doesn't make sense exactly but never leaves the reader twitchy and wondering if there will be an ending or not. And the clues and such are cool, and are anchored into the history of the city. But what I loved most were the three ki...

Đọc thêm

Courtney's Book Nook

Tìm kiếm Blog này