This was an interesting little book. It is meant for younger readers but I saw it in a LFL and thought I'd give it a read. I liked how during the first loop we read about is from Ben's perspective then the next is from Maggies. I also really enjoyed the outcome and how their problem was solved but the ending did have a sad part to it. I think this would be a really great book for younger readers to get them talking and thinking creatively/outside the box. ( )

Sixteen-year-old Ben and Maggie hit it big at the OTB, but never got a chance to enjoy their winnings because they were robbed and shot dead by Roy, a killer and career thug. Unable to stay dead, Ben and Maggie get to relive their day and deaths over and over, caught in a Time Loop.

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I chose to read this book because of the synopsis in the front cover. It sounded like it could be similar to All Our Yesterdays , by Cristin Terrill, which was mind-blowingly awesome. Sadly, this one didn't even come close to the imaginative world-building and intensity of plot that was the hallmark of All Our Yesterdays . The loop was never explained fully, the characters weren't fleshed out very well,and although there was non-stop action, a lot of it was accompanied with question marks on my part. So while it wasn't terrible, it just wasn't as good as I was expecting, and I didn't really care too much about what happened to the characters. But it will probably appeal to middle school students because of the action and the brevity of the book (only 198 pages).

Areas of concern:
A handful of the *s* word and at least one of the *a* word. A couple of mild kisses. One character accidentally sees the other naked in the hospital. There is quite a bit of violence, since the whole premise of the book is that these 2 teenagers stuck in a loop where they get murdered at the end. In trying to get out of the loop, the teenagers did some illegal things like stealing a car. ( )

I really enjoyed The Loop, but I fully expect to be in the minority on this one, and here’s why: time travel and time loops will cover a multitude of bookish sins for me. I LOVE books about time travel/loops. LOVE. It’s probably the #1 draw for me in a book(Maybe why Prisoner of Azkaban is my favorite Harry Potter book?), and so I’m willing to overlook a lot of flaws that other readers might not. And I overlooked some very obvious flaws in The Loop to give it a positive rating.

This book is SHORT–probably the shortest I’ve read all year, and while I have nothing against short books in theory, the length of this book isn’t really enough to cover the subject matter. It felt kind of like a rough pass, a first draft, to me really. The writing is fairly elementary, even for YA, and the pacing is definitely off. To even enjoy this story at all, a reader who have to employ a pretty hefty amount of suspension of logic. The romance isn’t quite insta-love, but it’s definitely close. And on the whole, I’d say it’s a bit sloppily done.

And yet I REALLY liked the plot and the story. The idea of being stuck in a time loop where you die at the end of each one with only a vague notion of what’s coming is quite terrifying and really drove a lot of the suspense in this story. I was quite satisfied with the way the plot and the ending played out. It can be quite hard to write an ending for this kind of book that doesn’t feel like a cop-out, and I think the ending was probably one of the biggest strengths of The Loop. ( )

I had problems with this book's premise right from the start. I tried to ignore them and just enjoy the ride, but it was hard – my brain kept interrupting with questions that the book never satisfactorily answered. For example, since Steve's loop lasts less than a month, what happens to him after that time is up? Does he die at the end of his loop, the way Maggie and Benjamin did? If not, then how could he continue to exist past the end of his loop? If he did die at the end of his loop, how could he ever manage to break it? Unless every single individual who has ever gotten stuck in a loop has created multiple parallel timelines or something? Just trying to figure out the logic of the loops makes my brain hurt.

There were other problems with the whole “loop” concept. Supposedly, Maggie had previously gone through four other loops. When she first brought it up, I assumed she meant that she had gone through her and Benjamin's loop four times, but her statement was later clarified to mean that she had actually gone through four other separate loops. Had I been Benjamin, my first question would have been “How did you get out of them?” but he never even tried asking that. Both he and Maggie just assumed that they'd break out of their loop if they managed not to be killed by Roy. I thought that was a pretty big assumption.

Most everything they knew about loops they learned from Steve. I couldn't fathom why they'd trust a thing he said about “bending Fate” and breaking out of their loop when he had never been able to break out of his own loop. That's like asking a guy who'd gotten into a bunch of accidents and earned lots of traffic tickets to teach you how to drive. Maggie should have been a better source of information, but, like I said, Benjamin never even bothered to ask her how she got out of her four other loops, and she never volunteered any information.

This was very much a plot-driven book. Readers were given bare-bones information about Benjamin and Maggie, and that was pretty much it - most of the book was about Maggie and Benjamin trying to keep away from Shreveport while "Fate" kept throwing a bunch of things in their way (every road away from Shreveport is blocked by accidents or knocked down trees! money for bus fare just happens to be right where they can find it!) to get them back on track for their fatal meeting with Roy. There was no explanation for Benjamin's love for Maggie, and her love for him, beyond “they knew each other really well after all those repetitions together.” Most of the book was written in the first person, from Benjamin's POV. In chapter 30, it switched to first person from Maggie's POV and, sadly, it was hard to tell the difference between her “voice” and Benjamin's.

All in all, The Loop's fairly fast pace and short length made it a quick read, but I was left feeling unsatisfied and frustrated. The characters weren't interesting enough to make up for the flaws in the premise and the story, and the ending seemed way too easy.

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )