Future Shock (Future Shock #1) By: Elizabeth Briggs

Plot:

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?

The first book in an unforgettable series about rewriting your destiny in the city of dreams.

Review:

Elena is a protective foster kid that’s about to age out of the system. She’s incredibly smart with an eidetic memory, but has a tendency to lash out violently while protecting weaker people. Stressed and running out of options when a big tech company offers her an undisclosed, but apparently massive sum of money, she accepts and ends up traveling to the future.

I liked Elena a lot. She was a teenager, so she had her annoying moments, but she was smart and well fleshed out. Her “romance” with Adam was weird, and Future Adam’s attempts at giving them a “moment” went into creepy territory. It didn’t make sense and I wasn’t a fan. The characters by themselves were fine, but the romance felt forced and way too fast, especially since she spent so much time not trusting him.

The other characters were less interesting, though, they grew on me by the end.

The ending…*sigh* I was not a fan. I like a happy ending, but I don’t require one. This one felt, rushed and anticlimactic and Elena who had been mostly smart up until that point just kept making stupid decisions. They all did, actually, except Adam. It was frustrating and left me unsure if I wanted to continue with the series.

I love time travel, I thought Elena was a great character, I also really enjoyed the future tech that was shown, but all of that wasn’t enough to overcome the parts of the book I disliked.

3/5