4 stories set in different time periods lead to 1 end. ( )

Quick & Dirty: An interesting concept, but I just ended up being really confused and disappointed in the end.

Opening Sentence: Dylan asked his first Impossible Question when he was five, when he could still hear music in running water, still find gilded kingdoms trapped in beams of sunlight.

Excerpt: Yes

The Review:

What can change in a hundred years? How will your life effect the lives of those to come? Read the story of five teens and how their stories are all connected even though they all come from a different time period.

Dylan has always asked impossible questions and it has allowed him to develop a special ability to see glimpses of another world. Everyone in his life thinks he is going crazy, but Dylan soon figures out that he can use his special ability to persuade people to do and see what he wants.

I wasn’t a fan of Dylan’s story. I found it confusing and boring. He was a weird character that was hard to connect with and I just didn’t find him interesting. To be perfectly honest, if I wasn’t reading this for a blog tour I probably would have given up after reading his story. Luckily it did get better.

Brixney lives with her older brother in a debtors colony because they lost everything when their parents died. She had to drop out of school and get a job at a crappy restaurant to try to earn enough money to keep her family afloat. The only way she is going to ever be able to pay off her debts is to get hits on her social media channel. One day at work she meets a boy from the Other Place and it changes her life forever!

Brixney was my favorite character in the book. She was spunky, smart, and caring. She was one of those characters you want to cheer for and her situation made her easy to sympathize with. I loved her and wished her story had been longer!

Epony grew up on a farm and the Others now live among the humans. Her family has never had much money but they were happy until the government decided that their town needed to be flooded for the good of other cities. Epony and her family are relocated and Epony is offered an opportunity to support her family filming an alien drama with her childhood sweetheart.

Epony is a sweet girl but there were times when she seemed awkward to me. I didn’t really like how she let some of her friends treat her but I did like the person she grew into. Out of all the characters I thought she showed the most growth.

Reef lives in a world where some people have figured out how to cross into the Other world, but not everyone has the ability. For those who aren’t fortunate enough to be able to experience the Other personally they can play Alt. A game that allows you to experience the Other world without actually going there.

Reef was an extremely boring character and I couldn’t get into his story at all. He was just so plain and nothing about him stuck out to me. He wasn’t a character I cared about and sadly his story was a struggle for me to read.

Quinn lives in a place that was once known as Canada. She has always known that she had special work that she was supposed to perform and when the time comes she will have very important decisions she will have to make.

Quinn was an interesting girl but her story and world were really hard to understand. It was also really short, so I didn’t feel like I got enough to fully connect with her. Also, she was supposed to connect everything and I didn’t think things came together very well in the end.

Where Futures End is an interesting story that was very confusing. I will admit that I have never been a huge fan of short stories, but I do enjoy novellas from series I have read. This book fell somewhere in between the two. Each new section tells a different story, but all of them contain some of the same elements. I think the concept was really cool but ultimately it didn’t quite work for me. I hated that I would finally start liking a character and all the sudden their story would end. I wanted more from some of the characters and a lot less from others. Also, just the whole sci-fi aspect of the story didn’t quite make sense. By the end of the book I was so lost and I honestly just didn’t get the point of the whole book. I enjoyed parts of it, but I don’t think this was a book for me. If the book sounds interesting to you and you don’t mind short stories maybe this will be a better read for you.

Notable Scene:

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I say. “You look perfectly normal to me. You feel perfectly normal.” I move my hand down to grip his.

He grips back. “I’ll show you.”

And then I’m not holding his hand and I’m not looking into his face. I’m sensing him with something other than my eyes or my skin. His face is not a normal face but a screen of flickering images, a loose collection of color, like dust motes caught in a shaft of light. His hand is warmth and light and energy, but nothing solid.

He’s a cloud.

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FTC Advisory: Kathy Dawson Books/Penguin Teen provided me with a copy of Where Futures End. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review. ( )

Soooo, my heart wants to give Where Futures End 6 stars, while my brain keeps telling my feely place to pump the brakes and rate with more objectivity. Therefore I'm compromising with 4 stars - seriously, though, I think Parker Peevyhouse just raised the bar on YA by, like, THIS much.

Summarizing this book is difficult: there's science and magic and it definitely has some timey wimey bits. The author describes it as"Donnie Darko + Cloud Atlas"; I can see that. Aside from the overall vibe, I most enjoyed the worlds. They're not shiny, happy places, that's for sure, but they felt real and entirely possible. Surprisingly I found the ending rather uplifting...I'm probably in the minority there.

Do I recommend Where Futures End? 100% yes! Only, I'm not exactly sure who I'd recommend it to.

4 stars

"Five interconnected stories that weave a subtle science-fictional web stretching out from the present into the future, presenting eerily plausible possibilities for social media, corporate sponsorship, and humanity, as our world collides with a mysterious alternate universe." ( )

Where Futures End is a very ambitious novel by Parker Peevyhouse, particularly as a debut novel. It consists of five novellas which stretch forward in time from the present, each told by a different character in a different time. I am hesitant to call it a great YA novel because those who might not read YA would miss out. So I will say that this is a great novel. Groundbreaking in some ways since most books of interconnected stories have common characters or, if spanning generations, then common familial ties or such. This is a wonderful synthesis of SF&F with a very human drama.

I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys speculative fiction, SF&F, character-driven stories and just very well-written prose.

Reviewed from a copy made available through Goodreads First Reads. ( )

If you're going to compare an author to Marcus Sedgwick or David Mitchell or M.T. Anderson or Patrick Ness, that author had damn well better be a genius. Parker Peevyhouse is not. The book is fine, but does not belong in such rarefied company. ( )