Loop

by Karen Akins

[Angie]

I received an ARC through NetGalley.

I was extremely excited for Loop, because time travel is just so much fun, and interesting, and mind boggling! Plus the fact that Bree accidentally brings an entire person with her made me think this would be exciting and full of time travel hijinks! Sadly, that is not what happened. This review is going to focus on the world building, because with time travel, the world building is everything. How the current world works, how the past works, how the future works, how time travel works, and how time travel connects the past, present, and future. Without it nothing will make sense. Or in this case, nothing makes sense anyway.

The way time travel works in Loop is very different than what I've read before. For one, the ability is genetic, which is interesting. Also, you can't change the past no matter what you do. In every other book I've read, the characters have to be careful to not change the past so they don't mess up the future. This little change took away the excitement of time travel, since things are already set in stone. But my main problem with this was that it made it so that there was no point to time travel if you weren't just studying the past, which isn't the case for most people in this future.

Loop opens up with Bree doing her mid-term, which was to deposit something on a specific grave in the past. Well, she goes to the past, things don't go so easily, and she returns to her time, where she lies and says she completed her assignment. She admits that she can make up information for her report and no one can prove it, which makes the whole exam pointless. It's not like whatever she left on the grave will still be there 200 years later. I suppose a teacher could go back to the same time and check, but wouldn't Bree know that? Also, wouldn't leaving something there technically be changing the past? Unless small things like that don't matter. Or maybe her traveling back already happened, since the present is the past of the future? I don't know.

Something else that immediately bothered me about Loop was when it came to the black market deliveries. At first, this idea fascinated me! Then I remembered that you can't change the past! Apparently "Shifters" are hired to go back in time and deliver some object, usually an invention, to some person who then puts the payment into a bank account. The person from the future then cashes it out with interest! Can you imagine ~200 years of interest?! But even if that person would have ended up with this object anyway (you can't change the past!), that money wouldn't have been there for the future person, since that requires a change to the past!

It was also mentioned that future people go back as personal stylists to the rich, and tell them about the next fashion trends before they happen, allowing the rich people to get them first. Isn't that changing the past, since they wouldn't know about the trends otherwise? Unless it's that whole "the present is the past of the future" thing and it technically already happened. And there's a rule that someone on a mission to the past cannot talk to Shifters that live in the past, because they're not suppose to let information about the future slip. But the past cannot be changed! What does it matter who they talk to?! It does become obvious that there's some secret that they don't want past and future Shifters to exchange, but once again, they can't change anything, so it still doesn't matter what they learn!

The only explanation I can think of that makes these holes make sense is that maybe they're only told that they can't change the past, so that no one tries anything, since changing the future is actually the problem. Bringing something from the past up to the future (which would also change the past) can cause a reemergence of an eradicated disease, which could be disastrous. It doesn't work the other way, since Shifters are vaccinated before traveling. But even still, why not just have the "no bringing things back" rule. And why does no one notice that they are in fact changing the past? Well, there's some convenient inner monologue that Bree has about how no one really understands how it all works, but they're not changing the past by visiting the past and making changes by simply being there or directly changing things. Saying "no one knows" does not make up for shoddy world building!

In addition to the time travel aspect not making any sense, Loop suffers from other holes in the world building, which happen to make things more convenient for the characters. It's explained that you use your hair to gain access to certain areas. The DNA is scanned from the strand, and you're identified, and granted access or not. The hair is suppose to be attached to your head by the follicle. Well, Bree needs to break into some places, so she digs a teacher's hair out of a shower drain, and then just holds it against her scalp while it scans. That is not attachment! She should not be able to get into places she's not suppose to be this way! This inconsistency could have been avoided if it was never mentioned that the hair had to still be attached. The DNA should be enough, but I assume the attachment is a safety precaution, so that people don't go around stealing hair! So why not use something else, like thumb prints? Because thumb prints are easily stolen. Seriously.

Enough about Loop's endlessly frustrating world building, and onto the plot. I do think the plot could have been really fun if I wasn't so distracted by how much time travel doesn't make sense within the context we're given. I was expecting a twist that would fill in all of the holes, and there is one. Except that it relies on the fact that Shifter's can't change the past, so the previously mentioned holes still stand. However, it was an interesting twist if it had worked the way I think it was suppose to. It just didn't, since most of what was happening was due to Bree jumping around in time trying to investigate her mother's accident and leaving behind information that shouldn't have been there. Yes, changing the past.

In the end, I just could not enjoy Loop at all. I really wanted to love this one, but the contradictory world building made it fail miserably. There are a lot of great ideas here that I wish had worked out, but it simply wasn't meant to be.

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.