I love Ann Brashares. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants offered up a lot of a joy in my adolescence, and my own friendships modeled themselves after the love the girls in that series showed one another. I know Ann Brashares is capable of drawing dynamic characters than inhabit fleshed out worlds. She can make even the most mundane things carry the weight of heightened stakes. I don't know what happened with The Here and Now, because this book seemed to lack all of it. 
 I was extremely excited for this world because, time travel. While I prefer time travel from our present to the past I was willing to go with it. Dystopias are hot. I'm still getting time travel. What could go wrong? Just about everything. The future is vague and scary. There's a plague. But that's all we'll find out. People had to come to our present to escape, but they're basically in a cult. They're being drugged and watched, and someone may have been killed. All of that sounds very exciting right now actually. I wish it had been in the book. It wasn't. And there were no rules to this society (yes, I realize their were twelve rules they were given that's not what I'm talking about), it was a little bit of this, little bit of that, throw it in the pot and you've got a dystopia. Wrong. 
 The characters were blah. I had no vested interest in them achieving their wants, or even their survival. Also, this book seems to hinge on a romance that builds not at all. One moment they're playing hangman, the next their in l-o-v-e. Also there was a moment where Preena (because people from the future have futuristic names, duh) tells Ethan she's not comfortable with intimacy while they're staying in a hotel bed together, and he proceeds to try to feel her up. Preena kicks him out of bed in maybe the only moment in the book where I was like, "Yeah!" But this has no impact on their relationship. 
 Basically, there seemed to be no reason for anything in this book to happen. Sure, "she had to save the future of her society." But with that being a hot thing right now, you can find much more interesting societies to save.