Thank you to little brown and NetGalley for an advanced copy for an honest review.
Julia and Evan meet at Yale and fall in love. After graduating they move to New York together. Evan coming from a small town takes a job at a hedge fund and Julia takes a job at a non profit since she comes from a highly privileged background. This story takes you through their first years and how it changes them and their love. The author did a great job writing the characters and the feelings that occur during college and afterwards when you are trying to figure out life. I really enjoy it.

Really enjoyed this one. For a financial collapse novel, it doesn't come near Behold the Dreamers, but as a portrait of a relationship, it really delivers. Reminded me of a younger Fates and Furies.

This novel is told from the alternating viewpoints of Julia and Evan, college sweethearts who have just graduated and moved to NYC in 2008, just before the financial crisis, and covers the next year or so of their life as they deal with their jobs (hedge fund for him and an assistant position for her) and their relationship.

The book is told from their perspectives looking back from some unspecified time in the future, and the narrative doesn’t unfold exactly chronologically - it starts with them moving into their apartment, flashes back to college, with flashbacks jumping around to different points in time as the overall narrative moves forward. Even within the same chapter, things might suddenly go back to several weeks before. I did find this structure a bit confusing at first, but eventually got used to it; I also liked how sometimes we would see the same event from both of their viewpoints but it looked differently, kind of like on the tv show The Affair. Both characters were a little passive and annoying, but by the end I had grown to care enough for them that I actually wanted to know what was going to happen to them once the book was over. 3.75 stars.

Yes Julia and Evan are privileged but their experiences resonate across time and space. This is an interesting look at a couple coming to terms with their decisions and their futures. A nice debut.

This book is about that interesting period right after graduating college where you try to figure out your life. It was interesting and made me feel nostalgic.

Loved this book
Didn't want it to end
Highly recommended

Good story about just starting out and how things could go horribly wrong - I liked it.

A coming of age story, The Futures introduces you to the lives of Julia and Evan — as hopeful Yale students and at the same time as twenty-two-something graduates on the slippery edge of adulthood.

In the novel, the future is a vision, a dreamy destination with a range of opportunities in numerous variations, but the thought of the future evokes a different emotion — fear.

Graduating from college amid the 2008 financial crisis is just another obstacle, which brings this uneasy relevance to our day and age. Every decade has its own struggles, once we are supposed to become adults we have to start act like it whether we’re ready or not, regardless of the politics and socio-economics. There’s no easy year to start building, to begin growing. We just have to make it somehow and wake up on the next day.

The book also explores the motive of finding oneself within a young relationship and the build up to its aftermath. As often happens in reality, people open the door to themselves through friendships and relationships, through other people. The book softly guides the reader to growing and discovering, to filling the gaps left from adolescence, patiently pointing the characters the way to get there.

The Futures is plot and character-driven in a slow motion kind of way. The writing is fresh and somehow emotionally detached maybe due to its ‘looking back in the past’ storytelling. This brings me to the point of the nonlinear narrative — I liked it, it was interesting, but often irritated when it disturbed the flow of the relevant scene. Perhaps less is more.

And since every good book makes you think beyond what’s offered, I wonder why there isn’t more on Julia’s parents’ dynamics. They were her first example of a relationship, her push to be the person she thought she had to become. The photograph of her mother played a significant moment and yet Julia never brought it up again. She never thought to ask her mother what triggered the change in her— what made her who she is now?

I have kindly received a copy of this book from NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company, Lee Boudreaux Books in exchange of a fair review.

II found this a compelling story and hard to put down. The characters are well drawn and believable, and the writing is flawless. Loved it

Julia and Evan met during their freshman year at Yale. Evan grew up in Canada and attended college on a hockey scholarship while Julia grew up in Boston and attended boarding school. Their relationship continues past graduation and together they move to New York City.

Evan starts a job at a prestigious hedge fund while Julia gets employed at a non-profit organization. The financial crisis of 2008 puts enormous stress on their relationship. Evan get increasingly nervous as rumors of layoffs consume his workplace. He is sleeping less and barely has time to take care of himself. Julia is also finding that her first job out of college is not meeting her expectations. The life they both believed that they would share is deteriorating and both are forced to make important life decisions.

This book shows the progression people make as they grow through adulthood. The author does a wonderful job of depicting varying emotions of stress invading our daily lives. The book reminded me that mistakes made in your twenties are easy to rectify when your whole “future” is ahead of you. This is a debut novel by Anna Pitoniak.

I honestly felt so so about this novel. I guess I was expecting more but I just never really got there.

Gambling on the future involves risk. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Mostly, we make mistakes, restart, and move on. There are no guarantees in life. If we can learn from our errors, we improve our chance of success in the future.

The Futures is the story of young people growing up in a specific time in America, but the lessons are universal.

Julia and Evan meet at college. Their relationship is not perfect but they love each other. When Evan is offered a job too good to be true, working for a financial company in New York City, he imagines a glorious future with wealth, status, and success. Julia tags along, with no idea of what she wants to do with her life.

As Evan's work consumes his energy and soul, Julia feels neglected. At twenty-two, she thinks, she should have more than lonely evenings, a boyfriend too distracted and tired to even consider her needs, and a job she hates.

Communication, intimacy and mutual support compromised, each is drawn to other lovers. In anger, Julia betray's Evan's involvement in a bribery scandal in a futures trade for his boss.

I admit I passed on this book for quite a while because I thought I was too old. I have 60+ years of experience in relationships. I've made plenty of mistakes along the way. And I share some things with Julia and Evan: I moved as a young twenties to a big city, looked for work during the 1970s economic downturn, and ended up in a job I hated: customer service for an insurance company. Meantime, my husband's new career left him full of self-doubt and anxiety.

It turned out that I understood Julia and Evan much better than I thought I would.

Knowing who you are, choosing a career that maintains your integrity, and learning how to love is what being in one's twenties is all about. We must discard childish selfishness in relationships, and learn not to depend on the approval and affirmation from others. Emotional maturity involves forgiving ourselves, and those we love, for being merely human.

Anna Pitoniak has captured this aspect of the human experience.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Net Galley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

It wasnt what I expected or hoped which is my problem not the authors and possibly I had my hopes up too high. This book was cheesy to me.

A well written, involving tale of two young people finding their way. Pitoniak dares to make her characters a mix of innocence and blind narcissism, which makes their story all the more textured and real. Looking for more good things from this smart, talented writer.

An interesting debut novel which takes place in 2008 around the time of the financial meltdown. Julie & Evan move to New York City after graduating from Yale where Evan gets a "dream job" at a hedge fund and putting in very long hours. Julie, having grown up with a life of privilege and now finding herself left on her own and becoming lonely takes a job with a charity through her family connections. This is told in alternating chapters and perspectives by Julie and Evan. This story revolves around their relationship as Evan is immersed in business as Julie becomes more bored and eventually reconnects with a past "friend".. Will they both see the error of their ways and find their way back to each other and the hopes and dreams they envisioned at the start? Not a particularly new premise but one that is worth reading.

In this dazzling debut novel about love and betrayal and redemption, a young couple moves to New York City to prove their mettle and to find success—only to learn that such success may come with dangerous strings attached.

Julia and Evan falls in love as undergraduates at Yale. For Evan, a scholarship student from a Canadian logging town, Yale is a whole new world, and Julia—blonde, beautiful and rich—fits perfectly into the future he’s envisioned for himself. After graduation, and on the eve of the great financial meltdown of 2008, they move together to New York City, where Evan takes a job at a hedge fund. But Julia, who has only known a life of privilege, feels unmoored and increasingly shut out of Evan’s secretive world.

With the market crashing and banks failing, Evan becomes involved in an increasingly high-stakes deal at work—a deal that, despite the assurance of his Machiavellian boss, begins to feel more than slightly suspicious. Meanwhile, Julia reconnects with someone from her past who offers a glimpse of a different kind of life. As Evan and Julia spin apart into their separate orbits, they each find that they are capable of much more—good and bad—that they’d ever dreamed, and that betrayal is easier than they ever imagined.

Rich with suspense and insight, Pitoniak’s thrilling debut reveals the fragile yet enduring nature of our connections to one another and to ourselves. THE FUTURES is a glittering story of a couple coming of age and a tender, searing portrait of what it’s like to be young and full of hope in a city that often seems determined to break us down—but ultimately may be the very thing that saves us.

The premise of The Futures really pulled me in. As a somewhat recent graduate, I was drawn to the story of the way lives and plans change after graduation, when the “real” world comes into play. Unfortunately, this one really didn’t live up to its promises.

While the book does follow Julia and Evan as they move to New York City after college, I found it hard to relate to either of the characters. Evan seems to be constantly over-dramatizing his problems when they could be fixed relatively easily with a simple decision. As Evan is sucked deeper and deeper into work, Julia is left to deal with an increasingly difficult and lonely life. This would have made me relate to her in some way and have some empathy for her character if she hadn’t immediately used that as an excuse to cheat on Evan.

Honestly, the characters both begin and end as spoiled, selfish individuals who have lived relatively privileged lives and can’t deal with anything not going their way - whether that be at work or in their relationships. I don’t know many people who can relate to or would choose to empathize with these types of behaviors, and for those reasons I sadly cannot recommend this book.

**Disclaimer** I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

So, this is "New Adult." Surprised that Evan was portrayed more positively than Julia. Reminded me of Damages.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC, in exchange for an honest review.
Can two people from truly different backgrounds fall in love and stay in love when the odds are stacked against them, from the beginning?
Anna Pitoniak's beautifully written debut tries to tackle this question. Julia comes from an upper class Boston suburban family, and Evan comes from middle of nowhere Canada where Hockey is life. They meet freshman year at Yale, fall in love and the story is really all about their journey in New York, post college.

The book reads very quickly (I finished in two nights), and alternates between Julia and Evan - I enjoyed reading the story from both perspectives, I think it helps one understand their characters that much more. I thoroughly enjoyed the story.

Great debut!!

The author's voice certainly resonated with me as I felt it captured my generation's tone and anxieties about career stability and expectations in the wake of the financial crisis. But the book's melodramatic tone overshadowed that-- I am not really a fan of white collar thrillers so perhaps that's why, but the characters were telling the story from the future as if some gigantic doom lurked over them. Perhaps because they were young it would have felt more pressing in the moment but if they really were telling the story from down the road you would think the voice would have more perspective on the situation. They both turned out fine and seemingly happier and that outcome was belied by the ominous way in which they related the story.