The book opens with a fact: “In 1996 less than half of all American high school students had ever used the Internet.” And then we meet Josh and Emma, two high school students (he’s a sophomore, she’s a junior.) They’re neighbors, always have been, and were best friends as kids, though over the past 6 months they haven’t really been talking. But Josh’s mom sends him over with an AOL CD-ROM that his family doesn’t want, and Emma, whose dad just bought her a computer, installs it.
(In May 1996, I was in 8th grade. We’d had Prodigy at home a few years earlier, circa 1994, and eventually we switched to AOL. Ah, Prodigy. Remember those random letter/number screennames that were clustered together? My mom was lpft15a; I was lpft15b; when you went into a chat room you picked a different handle and I think for a while I was knibbles, after one of the 6th grade class pet guinea pigs. And oh, AOL: my first screenname was iluvharvey, Harvey being my favorite horse at the barn where I took riding lessons. I had an online penpal in Wales: I forget how we started talking, but I still remember his name and I remember that he sent me a letter on hotel stationery once when he and his family were on vacation in NYC.)
But back to Josh and Emma: Emma installs AOL, logs on, and gets the expected “Welcome!” voice. But then something weird happens, though Emma doesn’t quite yet realize just how weird it is: A “bright light flashes across the screen. A small white box with a blue border pops up, asking me to re-enter my email and password” (9). When she does, everything freezes for a bit, but then she sees a new page: “It has a blue banner running across the top that says “Facebook.” A column down the center of the screen is labeled “News Feed” and under that are tiny photos of people I don’t recognize. Each photo is followed by a brief statement.” (ibid.) And then Emma sees … herself, thirty-something and married, Emma Nelson Jones. She freaks out, and asks Josh to come back over, and they look at the page together, trying to figure out what the heck it is. At first he thinks it’s a webpage Emma herself has made, some mockup of something for some school assignment, but she swears it’s not. So … what is it? Is it a prank? Or is it really, somehow, a website from the future?
And if it is a website from the future, what are Emma and Josh going to find out about themselves? As they keep looking at it, they realize that each day the future-selves they see are a bit different: Emma’s sure it’s the Butterfly Effect, tiny things she does each day building into ripples that change the future. If that’s true, then, can she cause bigger ripples to change her future more drastically? The glimpses she sees of herself at age thirty-one don’t make it seem like she’s too happy. What can she do to change that?
This book is totally fun, and a really quick read. It’s told in chapters alternating between Josh’s viewpoint and Emma’s, and it’s a mix of standard YA plot lines (school, parties, crushes) and the whole Facebook/future question. It’s sometimes a bit over-the-top in its scene-setting: within the first 10 pages we get references to Friends, scrunchies, Dave Matthews Band, the Macarena, and Alanis Morissette; at one point one guy says he wanted to get a beeper, but his dad won’t buy one for him because “he thinks only doctors and drug dealers need one” (98). OK, I get it, it’s 1996. But I liked the story and the characters enough to not really mind. And while the characters each learn various things about themselves and life, the lessons of the book (living in the present, figuring out who you are and what you want) weren’t too heavy-handed.
Leave a Reply