Love Liz's writing and everything about the beginning book of this series! Exciting action and compelling characters!

I unfortunately was not able to read and review this book before the digital ecopy expired. The synopsis sounds great though, so I will be buying a copy of my own to read soon!

I recently bought a new kindle after my old one broke. For some reason I was unable to download this title from the cloud onto my kindle, therefore I will be unable to review this title. I am sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to read and review this book.

After losing and replacing my broken Kindle and getting a new phone I was unable to download the title again for review as it was no longer available on Netgalley.

I’m really sorry about this and hope that it won’t affect you allowing me to read and review your titles in the future.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
Natalie.

I am so impressed (there's a reason it's won awards since I first read this). The pacing is perfection and the use of words is exacting. Time travel is tricky enough to explain without a thriller aspect but somehow this novel handles that and more. Color me impressed.

3.5/5 An interesting dystopian take sending a group of teenagers thirty years in the future and then discovering all but one is dead so the mystery unfolds what led to their downfall. I'm not sure what future books would hold because this seems pretty wrapped up. A little disappointed in the reason for the time travel and ultimate betrayal.

Elizabeth Briggs plunges Elena Martinez into Future Shock as she lands thirty years into the future looking for technical information for Aether Corporation; however they arrive thirty years instead of ten years forward. As well they do the forbidden; look into their own future and discover a murder. Now they are in a race to alter the past to prevent the future. And they are all young and unarmed. Recipe for disaster.

I'm not sure how to review this. I liked the premise and some of the characters, but I am not sure I am invested enough to continue.

Very interesting read. Briggs is a science fiction wizard! What a fun start to a new series.

How FUN! FUTURE SHOCK was a definite surprise for me! The writing was a bit iffy for me, but eventually, I was just so caught up with the main character & the whole murder mystery aspect of the book that I just could NOT put this book down!

I previously submitted this 12/23/16 but somehow it is not showing up as going through. Here it is again:

I have a personal policy of not reviewing books I can't give an honest positive review to. For me this book has too many flaws for me to give it more than 3 stars, so it is just as well you refused to allow me to have reviewer access to the sequel. .

I did however like some of the author's non-paranormal romances. Here is one I posted a review on, More than Music:
http://www.mcmurryandaugust.com/2015/09/more-than-music-by-elizabeth-briggs.html
http://katemcmurry.com/node/408
https://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R1J2TEBD3FW67P?ref_=glimp_1rv_cl
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1378446794?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1

This book was okay. It had a couple of interesting ideas, but not enough to really keep me in the book. Even though it probably only took a few hours to read, it took me almost 4 months to finish the book. Once I put it down, I just didn't have much of a desire to pick it back up again to find out what happened.

The plot was pretty bare and one-dimensional. It was not fleshed out and it felt more like a first draft than a finished one. The characters were also one-dimensional and the author did a lot of telling about their personalities rather than showing, especially with the main protagonist.

That said, the story (bare as it was) WAS interesting. The best part of the book were the few glimpses you got to see of the future. The author did a pretty good job of making it feel different, but not completely foreign. The couple of devices we saw felt realistic and in that amount of time, I can see similar technology inundating our society.

The whole plot sort of hung on this mystery, which felt more like a sub-plot than a main plot, but there was nothing else to the story, really, other than that. It was not a bad mystery and she did a fair job building it. However, the resolution was lackluster and a little obvious, despite the attempted redirection.

Is it worth the read? If you nothing else is catching your attention and you can do this in one sitting, I'd say, sure. Putting it down and picking it back up was tough, though. The writing style took some getting used to and I did a lot of skimming, which worked in one sitting, but every time I picked it up I had to readjust and try to remember the details from my last reading session.

While fast paced and fun, the characters in Future Shock left a little to be desired, including personality. While the plot was fun, it did get a bit confusing.

Time travel? Check! Thriller? Check! Romance? Check! Coming of Age? Check! Cross-genre? Check!

So we have a tale that leaps across boundries with insouciance providing glimpses into potential futures through the eyes of a heavily tattooed, latina foster child on the edge of breaking out of the overburdened social "welfare" system. She has memories of mother-love overlapped with the horrors of what put her into the system (oh, no, not telling--read for yourself!) made inescapable by her eidetic memory. Fast-paced, complex (but never to the point of confusion) and surprising, this book was hard to put down.

This is the first of a series and certainly stands well on its own, but I suspect that if you are like me you will be reaching out for the next volume as soon as you finish this one.

I got my copy from Netgalley where one selects what one wants to read and voluntarily review. As a fan of time travel, the description intrigued me; the book totally hooked me!

Elena has been able to keep her ability to remember everything a secret for as long as she could. In and out of foster homes and struggling to survive, her secret comes out, and the mysterious Aether Corporation has recruited her for a special mission.

Elena, along with a group of other teens with special skills are being sent ten years into the future. When they get there, however, things go wrong as they are sent even further than they were supposed to. Adam, a science prodigy Elena finds herself drawn to, seems to have his own reasons for visiting the future.

Elena soon discovers a terrifying truth; she and the others are doomed, and according to the newspapers, Elena is the killer. Determined to stop this from happening, Elena will have to figure out who to trust in order to stop the murders and save her own life.

So much fun! Loved this read.

Having a read a great deal of YA fiction and being a sci-fi fan myself, I liked the premise and complexity of this title. The protagonist seems real and not a cliché trainwreck that can occur in this genre. I also enjoyed that the reader got a good ending, but not a perfect one.

This is a fast moving story. Its a lovely, sad, but couragous story with a good ending. Its a mystery but also has some futureistic stuff too😊😊

“No one wants to hire an underage, inexperienced, tatted-up Mexican girl. Even McDonald’s turned me down.”

About : Elena Martinez has slipped through the cracks of California’s foster care system. Desperate for money and a future, she signs a contract with the corporate tech giant Aether in exchange for money and a college scholarship: time-travel to the future for 24 hours and bring back info about future technology.

The only catch? She can’t look into her own future. It might mess with her mind or keep her from returning safely home. If she just gets the technology and gets back through the time portal, she’ll be set for life.

Elena signs up and, of course, ignores the prohibition on researching her fate. But she doesn’t expect to find herself enmeshed in the mystery of a murder: her own. YA science-fiction authored by Elizabeth Briggs and published April 1st 2016 by Aw Teen.

Thoughts : Future Shock is perfect for romantic sci-fi junkies, and I flew through it despite a few worldbuilding and research goofs.

It starts off a little rough, even helped along by Elena’s strong, captivating voice. The problem is Elizabeth Briggs’ outdated description of the current foster system in California. To give Elena strong motivations and high stakes for accepting Aether's offer, Briggs puts her in a desperate situation:

“In two months I’ll be kicked out of foster care, forced out of my current home, and most likely will have to drop out of school…Once we turn eighteen, they’re done. The instant checks stop coming, we’ll be out on the street.”

Thankfully, I happen to know that this is no longer the case, although it used to be true. My husband works as a juvenile probation officer and he deals every day with kids who’ve been raised by the CA state system. They do have access to financial and college aid, now, after they reach the age of 18. Elizabeth Briggs is describing the system of a decade ago, in Future Shock.

But, hey, this could easily have been set a decade ago, and thankfully the story moves fairly quickly into more plot-relevant terrain. I raced through the story, from here on out, because the pacing never slows and the mystery just gets better and better.

After Elena signs on the dotted line, she and four other teens prepare to travel one decade into the future. They will arrive in the future Aether headquarters and have twenty-four hours to gather as much technology as they can. Sounds almost too good to be true...and Elena knows it. She’s a street-smart Latina and she asks good questions: Why teenagers? And why foster teenagers, at that? I very rarely found myself ahead of the technical thriller plot.

And within the first forty pages, we’re in the future! The teenagers are extremely, entertainingly proactive—wandering into shops and exploring the tech—and I love how Briggs imagines the future with lots of cool goodies and sharp edges. Driverless cars rule the road, and they appear to be a government monopoly, as other types of cars were made illegal several years before.

Unfortunately, a few notes ring false in this future world, such as the fact that prostitution appears to be legal, but cigarettes are banned. I think a future that legalizes prostitution will likely legalize more drugs instead of criminalizing more, although I could be wrong about that. CA did just make cigarettes illegal under age 21, so perhaps Briggs’ future LA is spot on, in this regard.

A few other sketchy points jumped out at me. For one thing, [a big plot points involves a cure for cancer. It’s a nice thought, but I sincerely doubt it’s medically feasible that we’ll find a generic cure for every kind of cancer. There are too many different kinds (hide spoiler)].

Also, the author has apparently never watched Cops. In several action scenes, her cops seem to lack knowledge of basic police training and strategy. For example, in one instance, the police shoot at teenagers who are running away from them. This would be a major exception to police training, which teaches cops not to shoot at suspects who are running away. In several other instances, these teenagers escape situations in which police could have easily radioed in backup to contain the area. These oversights definitely neutered the action scenes, for me.

I was also hoping that Elena’s eidetic memory would play a larger role in the book. Considering how the whole first scene is built around her amazing memory, I was expecting more from that angle. Maybe book II will deal with it more.

But even when I hit hiccups or areas that could have used further development, I never wanted to stop reading Future Shock. The tech elements are a lot of fun, the pace stays in high gear and the mystery just gets better and better. Every chapter ends with terrific motivations to keep reading.

Overall : If you just read fast and don’t look too hard at the deets, I guarantee you’ll have a good time with Future Shock. I do have high hopes for a high-concept series or trilogy. I loved the premise, the mystery, the Latina narrator, the lightning pace, the imaginative setting of a futuristic LA…I hope this series continues. It’s a good thing. I’ll probably pick up book II, at some point.

Recommended To : This can be a great, fast read for romantic-sci-fi junkies. For someone who has stuck mostly to Fantasy, this YA sci-fi thriller could be something really new and fun.

Thanks so much to Elizabeth Briggs, AW Teen and Netgalley for this e-ARC!

Blog Post Review: https://christyluisreviews.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/future-shock-by-elizabeth-briggs/