Book Thirteen

The Future of Us
Jay Asher & Carolyn Mackler

What a clever concept for a book!  Especially for a girl who graduated high school in 1995 and vividly remembers her first foray into email and chat rooms.  Emma and Josh are lifelong best friends who have grown apart through the beginning of high school when one of those 100 hours of free America Online CD-ROMs we all used to receive allows them to travel from 1996 to 2011 where they stalk their own Facebook profiles.  Clever, clever, clever.

Obviously Asher and Mackler have the benefit of living in both 1996 and 2011, which makes it easier for them to hold a mirror to the obsurdity that is social networking in the second decade of the twenty-first century.  The Future of Us is billed as a young adult novel, and it certainly works as that, but I do wonder how much of the novelty of this book is lost on readers who were barely born in 1996.  I loved the memory trip of songs, dial-up internet, and phone cards.  I also enjoyed the look at Facebook and the way that Facebook allows us to believe that everything about us--our mood changes, our dinners, our deep thoughts--are of utmost importance to the world.

Above all, I think The Future of Us is a love story.  It's not just a love story between teenagers, but it's a love story with self and with parents and step parents . . . and with an idea of what the future should hold.  With its clever concept, it transcends the "young adult" genre and should provoke those of us who are Emma and Josh's ages--graduating high school in the mid 90s--to ask ourselves some important questions.  What is it we're doing on Facebook--reconnecting?  Holding on to an image of what we wish we were?  Social networking gives us all the platform to pretend that we're philosophers, while ensuring that none of us actually go beyond networking into deep relationships--with our spouses, our friends, our families, ourselves. 

So the questions are these:
* If I had a chance to know my future, would I want to?
* If I didn't like what I saw there, would I try to change it?
* Is it time for me to give up trying to know the future and simply live in the here and now?


Favorite Quotes:
"Even with our ability to look back on [Vietnam]," he says, "there's no way to know for certain what was lost and what was saved.  But that's how it is.  History's a bitch when you're in the middle of it."  (p269)

"He broke your heart!  How can you call it love when he hurt you so badly?"
Kellen pops another fry into her mouth.  "It was love because it was worth it."  (p53)

"Why does it say she has three hundred and nineteen friends?" Josh asks.  "Who has that many friends?"
...Josh turns to me.  "I can't believe she's writing these things."
"Not she," I say.  "Me."
"Why would anyone say this stuff about themselves on the Internet?  It's crazy!"  (pp31-32)