Friday 17 February 2017

Future Shock - Book Review


Future Shock (Future Shock #1)
by Elizabeth Briggs


What is it about:
What do you do when the future is too late, and the present is counting down to an inevitable moment?

Elena Martinez has street smarts, the ability for perfect recall, and a deadline: if she doesn’t find a job before she turns eighteen, she’ll be homeless. But then she gets an unexpected offer from Aether Corporation, the powerful Los Angeles tech giant. Along with four other recruits—Adam, Chris, Trent, and Zoe—Elena is being sent on a secret mission to bring back data from the future. All they have to do is get Aether the information they need, and the five of them will be set for life. It’s an offer Elena can’t refuse.

But something goes wrong when the time travelers arrive in the future. And they are forced to break the only rule they were given—not to look into their own fates. Now they have twenty-four hours to get back to the present and find a way to stop a seemingly inevitable future—and a murder—from happening. But changing the timeline has deadly consequences too. Who can Elena trust as she fights to save her life?


What did I think of it:
I have a weak spot for time travel stories, so I couldn't resist this book. Now I have to confess I also am very critical when reading time travel stories, so often time travel stories that seem cool before I start on them turn out to have faulty time travel theories, mistakes in time line changes, etc... You don't want to know how often I started on a time travel story to end up DNFing in annoyance. So I was prepared to get burned once gain.

This book turned out to be really cool though!

I liked Elena right way. She has had a difficult life, and it made her wary. She doesn't trust easily and for once I could really understand why she's not always communicating with those she has to work with. The other teens were interesting as well, even though they couldn't all get along all the time, I could find something to like in all of them.

The future she and the other teens travel to is intriguing and the time traveling felt like Briggs thought about it, I didn't feel like there were weird inconsistencies anyway. I liked how things fell together and how Briggs used some time travel theories.

The story was suspenseful and had me hooked from the start. Elena and the others manage to find trouble in the future and have some pretty narrow escapes while they try to figure out how to stop the past from happening. There were a few times I thought they made a very lucky escape, but I enjoyed the story too much to be annoyed.

The ending was satisfying and even though there's no cliffhanger I was hungry for more, so I immediately ordered the next book. Yup: I thought it was that cool! I also signed up for Briggs' newsletter and was rewarded for that by a free novella from a contemporary romance series, which we will definitely give a try as well.

Why should you read it:
It's a cool YA Time Travel read.


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