Saturday Pages: The Here And Now by Ann Brashares

Working on my NG ratio and very excited about quite a few of the latest books I've got approved for recently there, so I'm probably be having more ARCs reviewed in December than non-review copies!

For Saturday Pages today I have a book that I had been quite curious about even if I hadn't heard too many good things about it. Thank you so much to Hachette Children's Books and Hodder Children's Books for approving me for this one!

And since it is an ARC, it counts as part of my 2014 Review Pile Reading Challenge!

The Here and Now by Ann Brashares

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I was quite curious about this book and heard many mixed reviews about it, most of them on the rather negative side of it, but I was still intrigued enough about the book to decide to give it a change when I saw an ARC up for request on NetGalley.

All those not positive reviews managed something, that my expectations weren't high, so I was not very disappointed in this book. My main complain with the book would be that it mostly left me as I was... I found the premise intriguing but the execution itself didn't really stirr any feelings in me.

Prenna the main character I found annoying at times, because she kept on ignoring clues that seemed too obvious for me, and that's never good in a narrative. It's not that we as readers have access to information the characters don't have yet, because we're presented with the information as Prenna discovers it or shares it, but I simply kept on guessing stuff way sooner than they ever realized it, and that ended up being very irritating. None of what should have been big twists really felt like so to me, more of "quite about time you figured that out" moments.

The idea of the time travel and how it can affect the future one way or the other was quite an intriguing one, and at first the community of time travelers had an interesting build up that reminded me a lot of a sect, but somehow it ended up feeling a lil too formulaic, too much with the bad guys stereotypes being very two dimensional characters.

Ethan was not such an irritating character as Prenna, since he didn't have the baggage of the Community brain washing to get rid of, but even with him, I felt like there wasn't really any depth to him, so despite what should have felt like heart gripping moments, I found myself passing pages but not being really invested in the story.

I've read complains about Prenna and Ethan's relationship being insta-love... I really wouldn't qualify it like that, because despite what lil we see in the story, they've actually known each other for quite some time. But the development of their relationship fails at showing that depth, so I guess that why it feels like it comes outta nowhere.

I'm giving this one 2.5 stars (rounding up to 3) because it was a quick fast read, and it had a very interesting premise, but it was really lacking in depth. It seemed like it only managed to scratch the surface of what it could have been. It ended with enough loose ties to have a sequel, but I'm not interested enough to see what happens if there is.



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