Time Travel for Love and Profit. Sarah Lariviere. 2021. 320 pages. [Source: Review copy]
First sentence: The day my best friend, Vera Knight, dumped me, I didn't know what happened.
Premise/plot: Nephele Weather, our fourteen year old heroine, has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. And it all starts when her father hands her a self-published book, time Travel for Love and Profit.
Nephele decides to invent a time machine so she can redo her freshman year of high school. No problem, right? How hard could designing an app to allow for time travel be? She's smart after all. That's part of the "problem" as she sees it. She doesn't fit in with the other kids because she's so super-aggressively-weird. If she can just relive her freshman year only cooler and better then surely her life will be better, right?!
Long story short--and I don't feel bad spoiling because anything in the jacket copy is fair game--she loops (alone) TEN TIMES through her entire freshman year. Each year she spends dedicated almost exclusively to fixing the bugs and flaws in her program, Dirk Angus. One of the program's main flaws is that it is destroying her parents' brains--so there's that. Her parents are literally the only people in the world that retain any sort of memory of her.
Will Nephele ever grow up?
My thoughts: I wanted to love this one. I love time travel stories. The premise sounds reasonably entertaining. I imagined a time loop via Groundhog's Day or Window of Opportunity (Stargate) or even Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver. She's not struggling to get out of the loop--she's purposefully looping even though she sees the damaging effects it is having on her parents. And here's the thing, looping isn't making her happier. It's not. If her mission was to have a better life, it's failing in every sense of the word. But she's stubborn and persistent that even though I've tried before and failed, this next time will be different.
It is very much a premise driven novel.
Nephele was not a likeable person (in my opinion). My personal observation is that what time she did spend reading, she spent reading the wrong books. If she'd read better books, I'm not sure she'd have had to loop ten times. I'm not sure she'd even have looped once. Because books can ground you. If she'd read even a handful of MG or YA books, she'd have learned everything she needed to know to face her sophomore year the first time. She'd have known that she would find her people--even if took a while. She would have realized that there is life outside of high school. She'd have learned that some things just don't matter in the long run. She could have spent her time learning to love herself.
I do think it is thought-provoking in a way. It could have gone many different ways. For example, she could have wanted to time travel to post-high school. To avoid the stresses of high school altogether. She really should have thought of *aging* in terms of time travel as well. But no matter what she chose to do with the app--I think she was destined to fail. Because every loop was proof that she didn't love herself--or her life--the way it was.
The ending. I am NOT happy with the ending.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
B
E
L
O
W
I do NOT trust the new evolved APP. I don't. And I'm almost mad at Jazz (aka Jeremiah) for encouraging her to give the AI a "soul." The book ventured into horror there at the end...and I think our main character is clueless and doesn't realize it.
© 2021 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment