When Nephele has a terrible freshman year, she does the only logical thing for a math prodigy like herself: she invents a time travel app so she can go back and do it again (and again, and again) in this funny love story, Groundhog Day for the iPhone generation.
Fourteen-year-old Nephele used to have friends. Well, she had a friend. That friend made the adjustment to high school easily, leaving Nephele behind in the process. And as Nephele looks ahead, all she can see is three very lonely years.
Nephele is also a whip-smart lover of math and science, so she makes a plan. Step one: invent time travel. Step two: go back in time, have a do-over of 9th grade, crack the code on making friends and become beloved and popular.
Does it work? Sort of. Nephele does travel through time, but not the way she planned--she's created a time loop, and she's the only one looping. And she keeps looping, for ten years, always alone. Now, facing ninth grade for the tenth time, Nephele knows what to expect. Or so she thinks. She didn't anticipate that her new teacher would be a boy from her long ago ninth grade class, now a grown man; that she would finally make a new friend, after ten years. And, she couldn't have pictured someone like Jazz, with his deep violet eyes, goofy magic tricks and the quietly intense way he sees her. After ten freshman years, she still has a lot more to learn. But now that she's finally figured out how to go back, has she found something worth staying for?
MY THOUGHTS
I was really psyched for this book when I first heard about it! It sounded like a fun, intriguing book, with so many things I love! Unfortunately, I didn't like this book as much as I hoped.
Nephele, or Fi, has had a terrible freshman year, ever since her best friend decided that Fi wasn't worth hanging out with anymore and the whole school started to make fun of her for being too weird. After reading a Time Travel self-help book, Fi decides that inventing time travel will solve all of her problems. She'll go back to the first day of freshman year, and get her friend back. But, when she travels back, there's a big problem. She is a freshman, but now her ex-friend and everyone else are sophomores and don't remember her. Her family can't even remember the year she was born. No matter what she does, she remains repeating the ninth grade, everyone else aging around her. How can she fix the mess that she started?
I'll begin with what I liked.
I love the concept behind this book. The concept is what made me want to read this book in the first place. I love reading books featuring time travel, and I love books with repeating days/loops. This book had what looked like a combination of both. This book didn't take on the concept like I expected it to. It turned it into a completely new idea. I have never seen a time loop quite like the one in this book. Here we don't see a girl repeating the same year over and over again, we see her repeat the same age over and over again. I was curious to see how it would play out, whether she would age in terms of her own maturity (without aging on the outside), and how time would change with her. The way the author dealt with this concept and made it a unique idea was my favorite thing about this book.
I also liked that this is a young YA book. There is such a big gap between MG and YA because most MG books now feature 12-year-olds and most YA feature characters 17 and older. This book of course focusing on freshman year so it is full of fourteen-year-olds. A lot of the topics addressed also felt more lined up with younger YA than the older YA that we are used to seeing on the shelves. We don't see very many books featuring characters in their early teens, so that was really refreshing.
Now, for what I didn't like.
I did not like the characters. The characters weren't bad or unlikeable, they just didn't feel like real people. They never talked like real human beings and I felt like the author was trying to hard to make the characters quirky. For instance, the MC's eventual love interest. He wears wacky clothes, does magic, has violet eyes, has a crazy name, and speaks poetry. All of these in one person just screamed quirky, and it was that way with so many characters. Another character constantly wears roller skates, even in school. They didn't feel like real people, which meant that I had difficulty connecting with them and the story.
The story also quickly jumps through the time loops. It could be a good thing that we don't stay in the loops very long considering she goes through ten of them, but it negatively impacted the beginning of the book. We didn't stay in the first time (the original freshman year) long enough. We never see Fi and Vera (her ex-friend) as friends. There is a scene in the very beginning where Fi is talking to Vera, and Vera just walks away. This is the closest scene to them being together, and it's the scene where they stop being friends (and it's the first two pages). Since we never see them as friends, I couldn't understand why Fi was so desperate to resort to time travel.
IN CONCLUSION
Overall, I am disappointed in this book. I expected a lot more from this book, but I just couldn't connect with the characters. That being said, I still found the plot interesting. The concept was intriguing and was dealt with in a new way. I wanted to see how each year would play out and how Fi would fix things. But, by the end of the book, I was very meh about the story and was kind of glad that it was over.
I hereby give this book
2.5 Stars
Meaning: I almost liked it, but not quite
