I can’t help it; every so often I feel the need to read something written for teenagers. I’ve avoided the Twilight series pretty much altogether because I’m not really a fan of the teenager vampire romance genre. I did, however, stumble upon a cute little slightly paranormal teenage romance. 

The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Macker is a fun read about teenaged friends who discover Facebook on an AOL disc before Facebook was invented. The dynamic duo of teenagers read their future Facebook statuses and try to change their destinies when the status reports aren’t exactly what they wish they would be. 

When Emma first reads that she is in a troubled marriage in the future, she tries to look up her future husband so she can avoid meeting and/or marrying him in the future. Her friend, Josh, becomes concerned that Emma is trying to change the future too much and wonders about the ripple effects that her small maneuvers will cause. Each time she does something differently than she did before, she changes her future. 

The book The Future of Us  is a little similar to the movie The Butterfly Effect, but is much less dark in tone. The ripples aren’t small when Emma changes her future, but at no point is she in truthfully dangerous situations, nor does she get molested or become a prostitute. Because the book is kind of a romance, most of the changes that Emma makes only affect her future husband. 

I liked the The Future of Us because it was a new twist on teenaged romances and because it made me think a little bit about my own life. Sometimes as I work my way into the future, I get so mired in the possibilities of what might be that it’s hard to make decisions. As I read the book, I started to think back about how my own decisions had changed my life and the lives of others and how much of a ripple effect certain actions had had.  

I won’t tell you how The Future of Us ends up; it’s likely that you can predict the ending of the book without even opening the book up. That said,  The Future of Us is a totally cute story for anyone wanting a fun feel-good read. The best part of the book is that there isn’t a single (or married) vampire in the entire novel.