Blog Post #21: The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler- Cross Book Inquiry

This book, The Future of Us, is similar to the book, Thirteen Reasons Why, by the same author. The book Thirteen Reasons Why (just to recap) is about a boy named Clay Jensen who receives a box of tapes by his friend/crush Hannah Baker, who has recently commited suicide. On the tapes there are 13 people on them and Hannah explains why each and everyone of them were somehow responsible for her death. 

These 2 books are similar because the way it creates suspense, is using the same technique. The element of the unknown. A lesson I learned in ELA class was that sometimes when you don't know what is happening, your mind creates all these out of this world scenarios so you believe that something bad is going to happening to you, even though everything is fine. What scares you the least, will eventually scare you the most. 

In The Future of Us, what scares Emma is that she doesn't know how to make her future a happy one. When she changes her future on purpose, it always ends up badly. But then whenever she goes back on Facebook, she gets afraid her husband is the reason why her life is ruined, or maybe she isn't happy in the future because of things going on in her life in the present. She doesn't know how to work this Facebook situation so she gets scared and thinks that if she doesn't change her future, she will never be happy. But she is probably making it all worse.

Also in The Future of Us, the character Josh is scared because he isn't checking Facebook. He kinda wants to be left out in it but at the same time he is afraid his future isn't looking so great. For example, he keeps on wondering if his future with Sydney Mills (the girl he likes in the present) will be a good one, or if he will end up hating it. Will his friendship with Emma ever happen again? He is to stubborn to check Facebook and just look at his future, so he thinks everything can be the worst it can be, but he will never know, so he should just stop thinking about it.

In, Thirteen Reasons Why, Clay Jensen goes through the same state of mind. When Clay receives the tapes Hannah sent out, he had no idea what he ever done to Hannah, so he creates all these situations in his head about what he might have ever done to Hannah. And when he starts listening to all the other tapes to get to his tape, he keeps on thinking of even worse situations because of what everyone else did to her. What he didn't know really creeped him out and the fact that he never knew when it would be his turn to hear his story, it created even more suspense and finally she got to his part of the story. And turns out, he wasn't exactly responsible for her death, but if he tried harder to help her, she might have not died. 

These two books are written by Jay Asher, which is probably why they use the same technique of suspense and they both have other things in common as well! But these things are really important because this is what makes the story interesting!