The Here and Now by Ann Brashares

The Here and Now
by Ann Brashares
Released |April 8th 2014 by Delacorte Press|
Edition |eARC|
Source |Netgalley|
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Follow the rules. Remember what happened. Never fall in love.
This is the story of seventeen-year-old Prenna James, who immigrated to New York when she was twelve. Except Prenna didn’t come from a different country. She came from a different time—a future where a mosquito-borne illness has mutated into a pandemic, killing millions and leaving the world in ruins.
Prenna and the others who escaped to the present day must follow a strict set of rules: never reveal where they’re from, never interfere with history, and never, ever be intimate with anyone outside their community. Prenna does as she’s told, believing she can help prevent the plague that will one day ravage the earth.
But everything changes when Prenna falls for Ethan Jarves.

The Here and Now was a book that took me awhile to get into. I've never read a book that deals with time travel before, so I was curious about this one when I first found out about it. I wanted to check it out, but unfortunately this book did not do it for me. I felt as though a lot of things were lacking and a lot of things, sometimes, just didn't make sense to me. I didn't connect with the two main characters. I didn't really like Prenna at all. She did a lot of reckless things throughout the book and I found it to be annoying. Ethan wouldn't have been so bad, but I didn't feel a connection to him either. I wanted to like Ethan because I gave up on Prenna after awhile, but I will say that I like him more.

I was extremely disappointed because this was my first 'official' travel book and I've been wanting to check out a book like this for quite some time. My issue is there wasn't much about the actual time traveling except that there was a shimmer in the air and she appear by a pond or lake or something like that. Did she step into a machine or was it a portal? How was it created? After awhile I found myself skimming through paragraphs just to make it to the end to see what would happen. The ending wasn't exciting and to be honest it was kind of bland. I did finish the book pretty quickly though. It was probably because of the skimming, but I was curious to know what started the virus and how things would end. So that was pretty interesting. I did find some parts of the book to be interesting, but not enough to make me rate the book higher.Overall, the book was okay at times, but I had too many issues with it.