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The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler is about two childhood friends who have drifted apart and discover something that they can’t believe. They can see the future.

More specifically, their future.

This book follows the lives of Emma and her best friend, Josh; lives that change as they find out more and more about their future.

Have you ever wanted to see into the future through a looking glass? In this book, Emma and Josh come very close to it. The book is set in 1996 and Emma has just gotten a new computer. Josh gets a CD-ROM in the mail that provides you one hundred free hours of internet trough AOL if you signs up for it and gives it to her, as his parents did not want them to have internet. Emma puts the disc into her computer and, after a bit of waiting, it’s all set up. She signs onto AOL, but…

It signs her into a strange site that displays the names of people she knows now with pictures that look like they are adults. The strange site is called “Facebook”. She asks Josh about it, him having no idea what she’s talking about. As they continue to explore Facebook and get braver—even checking out their own profiles and seeing what their lives are like in the future, they begin to get curious. If they know the future now, can’t they change it now as well?

Emma and Josh begin to make many different decisions that change their futures drastically. And in turn, they become obsessed with the then instead of the now. What consequences could come out of changing the future?

Personally, I’d rate this book a 10 out of 10. The best feature of this book is the plotline and the characters’ growing experiences, learning to look forward to the present rather than the future.

The novel follows an interesting perspective of a person from 1996 experiencing what we do now in 2015. There is humor in this as well—like taking modern-day slang terms literally. If you enjoy books about the future clashing with the past, this would be the book for you.