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The Bad Kid has a great voice and an incredible sense of place, but the plot took 50 pages to arrive, and I'm not altogether certain that, even if they're interested enough to stick with it that long, its intended audience will know enough about gangsters and the mob to understand what's going on. Kudos to Lariviere for not talking down to her audience, though: I'm interested to see how middle grade readers respond to this.
 
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slimikin | Mar 27, 2022 |
I thought it was going to be a sci-fi romp, but it ended up being mainly about it taking one girl a much longer than average amount of time to get over middle school. In fairness, we've maybe all had trouble letting go of the trauma of middle school.
 
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bibliovermis | 4 andere besprekingen | Feb 17, 2022 |
Lariviere, Sarah. Time Travel for Fun and Profit. Penguin, 2021.
For the most part, Time Travel for Fun and Profit is a standard Young Adult romance. A smart high school freshman has a hard time making friends and longs her first kiss, a la Princess Diaries. But she is a math whiz who has created a powerful AI app on her cell phone. The app gets smarter each time she uses it to time travel so she can repeat her disastrous freshman year. But it is not the total Groundhog Day event. She is in a time loop where everyone but her ages, though no one, including her parents, remember that this is the second time around. They all have holes in their memories. The book is a little better than all this makes it sound. 3.5 stars.½
 
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Tom-e | 4 andere besprekingen | Jan 25, 2022 |
Nephele Weather's best friend Vera drops her without a goodbye in their freshman year of high school, so Nephele - a math prodigy - decides that the best and easiest course of action is to build a time machine and go back to fix what went wrong. For Nephele, though, math is easier than interpersonal relationships: without Vera, her best friend is a photograph called Chicago, 1955, by Harry Callahan, that hangs on a wall in her parents' bookshop. Nephele codes a timeship and successfully travels back in time - but she realizes that she's erased her parents' memories of their past year; there are "black holes" in their brains. No matter, Nephele can just fix the code, go back in time again, and fix it...

Time after time, Nephele repeats her freshman year, talking through her "thought experiment" with a science teacher, until at last she makes friends - Jazz, Rex, and Airika - who make her think differently, not just about code but about the true best way forward.

See also: The Shape of Thunder by Jasmine Warga, Switch by A.S. King, The Loneliest Girl in the Universe by Lauren James

Quotes

It made me think about how time connects with itself every day....Time is folded into all kinds of shapes inside our heads. (21)

The question is, how can you be sure you're going the right thing until you do it? (37)

I felt frustrated, like I was doing something preposterous and couldn't stop. (65)

No one will recognize that you've changed your past except your future you....Everything that's different about you will be quietly folded into people's current understanding of who you are now. The people around you will do the work of hiding your time travel for you. (Oona Gold, 76)

You don't need to do loops in time for certain conversations to repeat themselves endlessly. (77)

I wondered if she'd ever felt as alone as I felt. Full of ideas so thrilling you want to share them with the whole world, and knowing that if you do, you'll be ridiculed. (81)

Why was it that every time I made a plan, that plan developed a mind of its own and ran off, wild and free, to do whatever the hell it wanted? (119)

Again and again, whatever I did, I ended up in the exact same spot. (196)

Sometimes you want two things, and they're located in opposite directions. (221)

"You cannot hurt people and then un-hurt them." (Jazz, 268)
 
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JennyArch | 4 andere besprekingen | Nov 27, 2021 |
I'm super torn on how I feel about this book. I love stories about time travel and time loops, so the blurb had me sold. Nephele has created a time machine so that she could have a do-over of her freshman year - and it worked, kind of.

The problem is what Nephele has created isn't time travel. She's NOT going back in time, per se. Instead she's jumping back into her 14yo self and repeating her freshman year - while everyone else around her moves on every year and ages, Initially, I worked way to hard to figure out how this works, and I finally had to roll with it to see where the story goes.

Now, this should quickly prove problematic for her parents as she perpetually repeats freshman year, never aging, but this weird thing that Nephele has created awkwardly resolves this plot hole, and so it becomes another reason for Nephele to try to travel back to her original 14 yo self.

The book jumps in and a little too far ahead - not explaining what happened with her friends to prompt her to build such a device in the first place. In fact, she's already repeated a freshman year when we find her getting ready to jump back again. I don't feel like I ever got a good grasp of the WHY of her actions. And don't rest too long on the how, because you just need to believe she can program all this on her iPhone.

And yet...even though the characters in her 10th jump are truly out there and more than a little unrelatable at times, there's something about the story that, halfway through, had me throwing all longing for understanding of the physics and the mechanics of the thing so I could enjoy the story.

Honestly, the story is weird, the iPhone app is weird, and there are SO many issues with the plot that I should have absolutely hated it, but there is something charming and fun and hopeful about the story. You just need to suspend disbelief for this one to work for you.

I'm giving this one 3-1/2 stars. What it lacks in execution it makes up for in weirdness, fun, and something I can't put my finger on but ultimately enjoyed.
 
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jenncaffeinated | 4 andere besprekingen | Jul 4, 2021 |
I received an arc for this book from netgalley. I think it was a cute story but it was lacking. I felt like there was a huge build up and then just nothing. Nephele starts out with one main reason to build a time travel machine and when things go wrong she has multiple reasons to fix it. She does learn some valuable lessons along the way but the ending was just disappointing. I feel like she went from being a true scientist to being just a love sick teenager. There were a lot of what ifs that I can understand with the topic of time travel and science but I also feel when its story you have the creative freedom to make things possible. I just think that it is a really good plot that was not executed well.
 
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KeriLynneD | 4 andere besprekingen | Mar 3, 2021 |
Toon 6 van 6