**ARC courtesy of Netgalley in exchange for an honest review**

How terribly disappointing this book was. The book had a great concept, but it was poorly executed and written.

Yeah...

The overall concept of the story is that a group of people from sometime in the 2090s travels back in time as refugees to the year 2010. Why, you ask? Because the future is ridden with plague and natural disaster. They live in their little communities in secrecy, basically being content just surviving. The main character, Preena, however, does the unthinkable and teams up with a "time native," Ethan, to save the future of humankind.

With that said you would think they would embark on some epic adventure to save the world or something, however what happens is that they embark on some not so epic adventure to save the world. In fact, they take breaks to play card games quite frequently, which, in my opinion, is not even interesting in real life, let alone in the middle of a mission to save the world. And of course they had to take breaks to go to the beach, flirt, and have Preena tell her life story in the process. Right, perfectly logical to just relax and take your time when the fate of the world is in your hands.

Then there's the characters themselves; Preena and Ethan were flat characters, and the secondary characters really weren't any better. With the characters being as flat as they are, the romance was subsequently not believable. It would have been surprising that the romance between Preena and Ethan even happened at all if it weren't so predictable (let's face it, a female and male lead are always going to fall for each other). Preena really only became interesting almost at the very end, and I have to say it did feel good when she finally stood up for herself.

There's also the plot twists; most of them were predictable, but there were some that caught me off guard and made me curious about how the novel would play out. I won't say that the book did not have any interesting parts, in particular at the end, but most of the novel was dull and, frankly, poorly written. The Here and Now gets 2 stars because it was not the worst book I've ever read, but it could have been so much better.

The Here and Now - Likewise Book Reviews

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