"The premise of a person with an incredible history, with kind of a haunted memory, with stories to tell, with secrets to keep, and even a certain amount of shame, put in the life of a fairly ordinary suburban American teenager. "And I spent a lot of time with this book with my head in my hands, sitting at my desk, trying to keep things straight."īut even as she was mapping out criss-crossing future timelines, Brashares was also drawing inspiration for her central romance from classic YA: Bette Green's 1973 novel Summer of My German Soldier, about a friendship between a young Jewish girl and an escaped German POW. You have to decide how you're going to handle the paradoxes, how you're going to handle the changes that people make, whether time will even allow it," she says. "You have to figure out your own rules, I guess, for time travel.
Such a complex storyline poses a problem for a writer who's never stepped into a time machine before. And Prenna's falling in love - forbidden love - with a present-day boy. Now, they're hiding in plain sight, forbidden to mix too closely with the locals - and wrangling over whether they ought to try to change their terrible future, or just stay safely in the past. Now, dystopian future tales aren't actually all that unfamiliar to YA readers, who've been gobbling down things like the Hunger Games and Divergent for years - but Brashares says she's not really following the trends: "I tend to be not all that tuned in," she says.Īnd she has done something a little different with the genre: The Here and Now takes a young girl from a terrible future and transplants her to present-day upstate New York, via time travel.ġ7-year-old Prenna James and her whole community have escaped a world that's been all but wiped out by "blood plagues," deadly mosquito-borne diseases. It was eventually made into a couple of movies.īrashares' new book, The Here and Now, ventures into unfamiliar territory for her: a dystopian future of "blood plagues" and time travel.
How?Īuthor Ann Brashares became a young adult superstar more than a decade ago with the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, a feel-good series of books about the adventures of four best friends and a really great pair of jeans.
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