The Loop

Author: Shandy Lawson
Goodreads Rating: 3.15
Pages: 208
Format: ARC from Swap

Ben and Maggie have met, fallen in love, and died together countless times. Over the course of two pivotal days—both the best and worst of their lives—they struggle again and again to resist the pull of fate and the force of time itself. With each failure, they return to the beginning of their end, a wild road trip that brings them to the scene of their own murders and into the hands of the man destined to kill them.

As time circles back on itself, events become more deeply ingrained, more inescapable for the two kids trapped inside the loop. The closer they come to breaking out, the tighter fate’s clutches seem to grip them. They devise a desperate plan to break free and survive the days ahead, but what if Ben and Maggie’s only shot at not dying is surviving apart?

This book had so much potential and I was so hoping that it would knock it out of the park, but I think that it was just a little too short to accomplish that. The book was just about 200 pages which didn’t create an adequate sense of who these characters were. More than half of the book was told from the perspective of Ben, and then the last quarter of the book was from Maggie’s perspective. There was no heads up about the perspective change which irritated me a little bit.

I felt that Ben was the only character that we really got to know as well as Steve who was the crazy psychic who knew that they were in a loop.  Quite honestly? The only reason I think that is because we spend most of the book from his perspective but we don’t really learning anything about him the way that I hardly knew anything about him other than he was stuck in this loop, he lives in New Orleans and the only reason he is in the loop was because he went with his dad (or his dads friend) on a business trip. I felt like for having spent all this time in his head, I hardly learned anything about him and his life.

I think that Lili from Lili’s Reflections put it best when she said that there is a happy medium within books where they should be between 300 and 500 pages because anything more is too much and anything less is too little. Clearly there are exceptions to this rule, but this book really could have used some bulking up. Even now, trying to come up with something to talk about is difficult because there was just not enough elements that I could go into.  Usually I am super anti instalove, but this book didn’t have that feel except for Ben because Maggie at least remembered all the different times that they went through the loop, but he didn’t and he had his “I love you” moment, but it wasn’t as nauseating as I’ve seen.

At the end of the day, I think that it was a cute story and one that was original. It’s a quick read and something fun to break up some longer reading.

The Courts Decision: