The Future of Us by Jay Asher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I had a great time with this book, maybe because I was a teenager in the 90’s and so a lot of things were just like my own memories! Emma and Josh made me laugh out loud. If you are old enough, imagine it is 1996. You have a computer with windows 95 on it and there is that screen saver of the brick wall maze thing or the pipes (it is all coming back!). Emma is connecting to the Internet for the first time and all of a sudden Facebook appears, except Facebook was actually around back then and so Emma is looking at Facebook 15 years in the future. She gets her friend Josh involved and as they sit there reading through Facebook comments and likes and pokes they are not too sure what is going on. I loved it when after reading comments by Emma about what she was cooking for dinner, about getting a haircut, about seeing a therapist, that Josh is sure it is all a prank. He says something like, ‘Why would people write these crazy things about themselves on the Internet… ‘
There really were two parts to this story, one was the comical, OMG-that-is-my-future part where Emma keeps on trying to change things so she gets a better husband and is happy, but the other part of the story is about Emma and Josh’s friendship and how it got a bit broken but also about how they can fix it.
This was a mixed bag for me, laughing out loud one minute, feeling sad the next minute, wanting to give Emma a bit of a shake to tell her to wake up to herself and then also feeling all warm and fuzzy.
It did leave me thinking though…. I wonder how much we can change the future by doing things just a little bit different now..and also…. What kind of stuff do I put on Facebook!!
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