Kerri (Book Hoarder)'s Reviews > The Here and Now

2.5 stars.

Ohhhh, this book. I really liked the concept of it, and I wanted to like it a lot more than I did, to be honest. Overall it suffers from a lack of cohesiveness and doesn’t quite fill in all the holes that need to be dealt with when it comes to time travel, though.

Prenna is unique not because of where she’s from, but when… Having travelled back to our present, she’s now trying to blend in and follow all the rules that her Community has set up for their successful integration into the new timeline.

The premise is fascinating, I’ll be honest. It’s what made me pick up the book in the first place. Climate change is a very real threat, in my opinion, and so any book that touches on that is likely going to end up on my to-read list. Add in the time travel and I was hooked. Science fiction and time travel go hand in hand, after all!

The book falls flat in trying to make the plot cohesive and also tie in the relationship, though. See, when Prenna comes through a boy named Ethan sees her. When the main plot of the book picks up four years later, the idea is that Ethan is in love with her, and it seems as though Prenna falls for him, too. It’s cute, but I couldn’t see the background in the book. It’s just sort of assumed, and there was nothing that actually demonstrated to me that they were falling for each other - other than that they were thrown together by the uniqueness of their situation, and being on the run.

The time travel also raised more questions than it answered - again, something that is all too common when it comes to time travel in books. See, apparently Prenna is from - wait for it - 2095. That’s right, eighty years in the future.

Now, I’m going to pause for a minute here to say that I believe in climate change and that we’re living in it right now. However, this book did not sell me on the believability of the events that are supposed to happen in our future. Things like blood plagues spread by mosquitos, language apparently changing, and the world basically going to hell… It’s not that I don’t believe that this is all possible, it’s that there wasn’t enough background in the book to support it.

There’s also the question of who was sent back, and why, and how… None of which is really touched upon. Apparently there’s almost a thousand of them, but there’s no information on who sent them back, what their goal is, or anything. Just the idea that the ones in charge are all evil and bad because they want the rules to be followed and it’s implied that they kill people (or send them away?) for breaking the rules. I wanted more explanation than this, because the whole process and concept of time travel is fascinating. There wasn’t much to explain it, though. Which brings up the question of how they even got back there... World going to hell, but they all travel back in time somehow? Uh-huh.

Worst of all, the book itself was only partly satisfying, in the end. All I ask from books is that they make things believable, and I didn’t really feel that it was, in this case. The resolution was a bit too pat, things are still up in the air. There’s no real satisfaction when you close the book, at least there wasn’t in my case.

That doesn’t mean that the writing is bad - far from it. The plot is intriguing, the basis original. I was just left with so many unanswered questions because the execution is lacking.

I received a copy of this book through Netgalley in return for an honest review.