The Here and Now by Ann Brashares

I’m going to come out and say this before I start this review: I love Ann Brashares’ writing. I loved The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series and I loved The Last Summer (of You and Me). She lost me a little on her other time travel/past lives novel My Name is Memory, so I was sort of skeptical about this book, but like with a lot of books, I gave it one hundred pages before making my final decision.

The crazy thing is? I was so deep into this book that I didn’t even notice when the one hundred pages passed.

This story is about a girl named Prenna who is an immigrant, but she isn’t from another country. She’s from another time. In this time, the world has been savaged by plague. Prenna and the others’ mission is to save the world from this plague, but they have twelve rules that they have to abide by while completing the mission. The one rule that Prenna is having a problem with has to deal with getting involved with someone from this time. There’s a boy – Ethan – who has been her friend/whatever for a while now and she feels like he knows her better than anyone else does.

But when a homeless man tells her that her people aren’t doing anything to change the future and that an event is coming up that will doom them all if it’s not stopped, she starts to question everything that she’s come to know in the last four years. She fights her own people and goes off with Ethan to try and save the world.

This book was ridiculously fast paced. Seriously, like I said above, I was really surprised at how fast one hundred pages went. The Here and Now gives the reader no time to breathe as it goes from one event to the next. Like the homeless man that alerts Prenna to what her people are really up to with the glasses and the medicine? He dies, but after he dies it’s revealed that he’s Prenna’s father. Wait. What? Yeah, that’s what I thought! I really had to go back and read that scene twice and yet I still didn’t catch it.

Prenna’s relationship with Ethan is hot, it’s kind of awesome that he’s been imagining being with her for the last four years. I was just disappointed that after everything they went through, they can’t actually be together because of the threat of the plague. I felt that it was a big let down.

Final Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. Still didn’t really care for the time travel aspect of this book – I still can’t get my head around the logistics of it. Still this book was much better than My Name is Memory.

Bookshelf worthy? Electronic or support your public library!