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paguroidea's review against another edition
dark
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence and Gore
Moderate: Bullying
helpfulsnowman's review
Maybe halfway through I started thinking, “Damn, I’m not enjoying this.” But...I wanted to see it through because I thought perhaps there was a twist that’d make it worthwhile.
Let me start by saying I'm a GIGANTIC JRJ fan. In maybe 2010 I made a stamp with his name and one of his book titles on it, and I vandalized library property, going through books that I thought would appeal to JRJ fans, and stamping them to send more readers his way. I don't know how many better bona fides there are.
So when I saw that one of my favorites was having a moment, his biggest mainstream success thus far, I was pumped.
I liked JRJ’s other books more than I liked this one. I’m a fan from the Bizarro days. The cockroach suit days. And The Loop, despite its excellent gore, felt like...Okay, let’s just do this, but know that I am not the majority on this one. The very things I disliked here seem to be things others appreciate about the book.
The reviews I end up writing for books I don’t like always end up super long, mostly because I feel a need to justify what I didn’t like about something, especially something like The Loop, which is not a bad or incompetent book, it’s just not to my taste. I don’t mean to pile on or overdo it, I just want to explain myself. Needing to “explain myself” for not enjoying a book should tell you most of what you need to know about me.
I don’t think this is a bad book, and coda to the stamp story, when I’d done my part to destroy library property, I sent the stamp to Mr. Johnson, and he sent me back a nice letter with some goodies.
The Loop is not a bad book, and JRJ’s DEFINITELY not a bad guy, a stupid guy, or a bad writer. In this case, I just didn’t get what I was looking for, and I’ll outline why because I figure other readers who have tastes similar to mine (both of you) will save some time and perhaps read one of his other books instead of this one. AND, some of you who feel like the things I dislike are the very things you like can move forward, reassured that you’ll get what you want.
Horizontal and Vertical
In any story, you've got your horizontal and your vertical.
The horizontal is the moment-to-moment explanation of what’s happening. "So me and Mike go down to the bar to get some answers."
The vertical is the characters thinking and feeling, usually related to the plot. "So me and Mike go down to the bar to get some answers. [horizontal] I feel a vibration in my hands, the same I always get when punching is about to happen. When I was a kid and felt it for the first time..." [vertical]
Maybe it’s useful to think of the horizontal as time, moving forward, and the vertical is the Zack Morris, freezing time thing where he talks to the viewer. Zack steps out of time and fills you in on something, a feeling, a flashback, whatever the writer wants or needs to make the story work, and then time starts again and we’re back in the horizontal.
In The Loop, the vertical does a lot of heavy lifting, outlining the past and (in the form of characters speculating) explaining the present situation. So we don’t really get some of the biggest stuff as in-the-moment action. A lot of the significant life events for these characters happen in piecemeal flashbacks, emotions told to the reader, or characters speculating, rather than letting us see what’s happening in the moment. It’s not my favorite method of doing exposition.
I think the lack of in-the-moment developments, best exemplified by the relationship between Lucy and Bucket being underdeveloped with reader as witness, that prevented me from getting to the emotional place that was intended.
Economic Morality
We're learning Rich Kids Bad, Poor Kids Good.
Everyone seems obsessed with the rich kids being dickholes, even adults seem obsessed, not with rich adults, but rich teens. This just KEEPS coming up in the book, and in a book where it appears that a bunch of people are being completely mind controlled by organic tech in their necks, implanted perhaps against their wishes or without their knowledge, I'm not sure why the poor characters are so focused on the socioeconomic disparity in the town. It just doesn't seem important to me that the person who is trying to kill you after driving a truck through your living room has a fat wallet.
It's a little bit like I'm reading a book where all the rich kids in town were turned into zombies, not because they’re rich, because they happened to be in the place where the zombie gas was released, and they're pursuing the poor kids, who weren't turned into zombies for some reason, and the distinction of rich and poor is still brought up repeatedly. Like...does this matter at this point?
And one of the zombified kids, it’s like the narrator thinks that he’s really just acting out his natural instincts because he’s THAT MUCH of a dillhole. I mean...it just feels like the book is trying really hard to push the rich/poor disparity as a critical point, but in this book’s context, it doesn't really connect.
Back to the 80’s
An 80’s, perhaps early 90’s plot point, was often about the military or more vaguely, the government, doing something evil.
In Short Circuit, the government is designing robots to fight wars for us. When one is struck by lightning and becomes sentient...the government goes balls out trying to destroy it.
Now, how does that make sense? Wouldn’t they want to see what’s going on here? If this one robot became sentient by a random injection of electrical energy, wouldn’t they want to A) Figure out how that happened, and B) Either prevent it in the future or use it to their advantage?
Maybe ET started this whole thing. But the deal with ET is that it’s a kids’ movie. It’s from a kid’s perspective. All the adults are violent morons. However, watching it as an adult, you...kinda see where the adults are coming from. A completely alien creature? What are they supposed to do, just let him live in a kid’s bedroom, alien sleepover style? Can ET survive on Earth food? Is there acid coursing beneath his skin, like some other aliens we’ve seen in films? The adults are wrong to not listen, but they’re not totally wrong to be concerned that a child’s bedroom is not the right place for an alien visitor to reside.
The Loop also has this throwback plot, the idea of the government (or big, powerful corporation, it’s kinda both) doing something that completely violates human rights, and it seems to be happening for no clear reason.
I’m not sure what the goal was, exactly, in creating these bio-tech parasites that connect people to each other. What was the purpose? What was the intention?
It seems like the suggestion is that this is a bioweapon, but...it doesn’t make sense. Based on what happens in the book, what’s the utility of a bioweapon like this compared to an atomic weapon, which is used to stop the spread of the bioweapon at the end of the book? Or, wouldn’t a virus (ahem, 2020) be just as effective without causing, I don’t know, the end of the human race?
If you’ve read The Terminal Man, you might recognize elements in The Loop, but in The Terminal Man, there’s a clear motive. Scientists were trying to cure a guy of a condition with what’s essentially a neurological pacemaker. And then it goes south in an unexpected but logical way.
The Loop only makes sense if you are already of the opinion that big corporations and government are evil and will do things, expending a lot of resources, just to fuck with people. I DO think both entities make horrible decisions that don’t benefit humanity, but at the same time, I think these are economically-based, or they’re the product of stupid decisions, not evil ones. I think, if it would be equally profitable, corporations and government would do the right thing. I don’t tend to believe that Google is working on some super secret biotech thingie meant to turn us into zombies. They don’t have to! We all know that internet shit is HORRIBLE for us, mentally, but we still dive back in.
Okay, now I’M getting all moral.
The OTHER Moral
Towards the end, I got it.
This is like a social media thing.
I’ll admit, that helped the story some. And maybe I’m thick, but I didn’t quite get there early enough to enjoy it.
And the moral is lost, for me, when the stand-in for social media is so obviously destructive and seems to provide no benefit whatsoever. I’m not sure why people would opt into The Loop’s biotech, and that’s the sort of insidious thing about social media: people choose to use it. Removing that element of choice makes the whole thing less impactful.
And why the scientists working on the thing would inject their children as test subjects is a complete mystery. Like...I get that maybe there’s an asshole who hates his stepson or something, but it seems to me that there is zero proposed benefit?
I sort of get it, and I think this angle improves the story, but I think being forced in a very literal sense to engage with “social media” changes the metaphor to be something different.
I also feel the metaphor doesn’t work as well alongside the rich/poor disparity. Certainly wealthier teens bullying other teens on social media is a thing, but it’s been my experience that bullying online is sometimes along class lines, sometimes racial, and sometimes, it’s just there. It doesn’t even really make sense. It’s often perpetrated by people who victimize their former friends as opposed to picking on one kid or another.
And, I think an important aspect of the social media metaphor is that one can opt out at any time, and people have such a hard time doing so. That aspect is not present in The Loop.
The Wrap-Up
I have three problems with the end:
Superman Returns
The thing I dislike about Superman Returns is that Superman gets the shit kicked out of him by Kal Penn on an island made of Kryptonite. Which makes sense. THEN, because he uses his willpower, Superman is able to throw the same island into space. I mean no disrespect to Kal Penn, but the strength disparity between getting housed by Kal Penn and throwing a large-ish island into space is totally incalculable. But Superman does it because he WANTS to badly enough.
Lucy is able to overpower the parasite because she’s...mentally strong? In a way that NO other person seems to be. Having a solution based on a vague level of “wanting it bad enough” doesn’t do it for me. I get it, she overloads the thing by thinking about horrible stuff, overfeeding it in a way. I just felt like it seemed to come at a convenient moment, and why is she able to do it and no one else? Because she’s the gold medal winner in the suffering Olympics.
Eyeballs
Lucy figures out how to banish the parasite from her body. And it works! It makes sense based on the previous parts of the book! But, at that point, is there a need to blow up the entire city? If they know how to excise the parasite, and it just involves stabbing out your eye, doesn’t that drastically reduce the utility of the parasite as a bio-weapon, and doesn’t that mean that everyone who’s been zombified is recoverable? Would temporary blindness cause the parasites to leave?
Do the eyes have to be stabbed out, or can they just be temporarily disabled? And waitaminute...why can the parasite repair a body that was completely twisted around in a car wreck, but it can’t repair an eye?
I also felt this came very late in the story, and it seemed like a writer’s back door. We needed Lucy to be infected, and we also needed Lucid Lucy at the end to have our emotional moment. So in the book’s final moments, we needed her infected, then de-infected, all in pretty short order. I suspect the eyeball thing was added later to facilitate this, but I don’t think it’s necessary.
The Scale
The story goes from being a fairly isolated town to being Let’s Save The World. I don’t think that was necessary. The scale of saving humanity, as a whole, gets too big and too abstract for me, considering the scale leading up to that point.
And whenever this happens, it’s a little like the episode of Captain Planet when the bad guy makes a new drug, gets kids hooked on it, and the way they solve this problem is by taking away the bad guy’s written-down recipe. Couldn’t he just remake it? However he came up with the formula the first time, isn’t this totally replicable?
If the tech company was willing to infect American teenagers as a test and able to cover the whole thing up, is it likely that the data to re-create this exists outside of this one town?
When the scale gets really big, the solution has to grow in proportion, and oftentimes this results in a cop out, “kill the head vampire and all the others revert to human” scenario.
The Part I Didn’t Want to Say So I Saved It For Last
I think this book has garnered some attention because it’s got a strong female protagonist who’s a refugee and of a lower socioeconomic class (sort of, relative to her peers), and the story does some work to highlight the struggles that might be experienced by someone of that identity set who feels like an outsider.
I have NO problem with any of that. It just doesn’t do much for me in this particular book. It doesn’t seem to be essential to the plot or the characters, just a thing that’s grafted onto a story that would’ve been the same without it. Or, perhaps more accurately, you could replace her race with a weight problem or being homeschooled or basically anything that might put someone to the outer edges of popularity in a white, rich high school, and that would make the story the same.
I'm a little over the depiction of high school as being this popularity-based Lord of the Flies situation where you take your life in your hands for being unpopular. I was not popular in high school. I wasn't the lowest nerd, either. I, like most people, was just sort of there. And it's fine. It's really not that bad. You go to school, you have a few friends, and you get by. Then you leave and it's over. And by the time you're 30, you can't even remember the name of that jackoff who gave you a hard time in Algebra II.
I guess I’m just trying to delicately say that I think the protagonist’s demographics score points with some readers. For me, it’s neither a plus or minus. Just neutral.
Let me start by saying I'm a GIGANTIC JRJ fan. In maybe 2010 I made a stamp with his name and one of his book titles on it, and I vandalized library property, going through books that I thought would appeal to JRJ fans, and stamping them to send more readers his way. I don't know how many better bona fides there are.
So when I saw that one of my favorites was having a moment, his biggest mainstream success thus far, I was pumped.
I liked JRJ’s other books more than I liked this one. I’m a fan from the Bizarro days. The cockroach suit days. And The Loop, despite its excellent gore, felt like...Okay, let’s just do this, but know that I am not the majority on this one. The very things I disliked here seem to be things others appreciate about the book.
The reviews I end up writing for books I don’t like always end up super long, mostly because I feel a need to justify what I didn’t like about something, especially something like The Loop, which is not a bad or incompetent book, it’s just not to my taste. I don’t mean to pile on or overdo it, I just want to explain myself. Needing to “explain myself” for not enjoying a book should tell you most of what you need to know about me.
I don’t think this is a bad book, and coda to the stamp story, when I’d done my part to destroy library property, I sent the stamp to Mr. Johnson, and he sent me back a nice letter with some goodies.
The Loop is not a bad book, and JRJ’s DEFINITELY not a bad guy, a stupid guy, or a bad writer. In this case, I just didn’t get what I was looking for, and I’ll outline why because I figure other readers who have tastes similar to mine (both of you) will save some time and perhaps read one of his other books instead of this one. AND, some of you who feel like the things I dislike are the very things you like can move forward, reassured that you’ll get what you want.
Horizontal and Vertical
In any story, you've got your horizontal and your vertical.
The horizontal is the moment-to-moment explanation of what’s happening. "So me and Mike go down to the bar to get some answers."
The vertical is the characters thinking and feeling, usually related to the plot. "So me and Mike go down to the bar to get some answers. [horizontal] I feel a vibration in my hands, the same I always get when punching is about to happen. When I was a kid and felt it for the first time..." [vertical]
Maybe it’s useful to think of the horizontal as time, moving forward, and the vertical is the Zack Morris, freezing time thing where he talks to the viewer. Zack steps out of time and fills you in on something, a feeling, a flashback, whatever the writer wants or needs to make the story work, and then time starts again and we’re back in the horizontal.
In The Loop, the vertical does a lot of heavy lifting, outlining the past and (in the form of characters speculating) explaining the present situation. So we don’t really get some of the biggest stuff as in-the-moment action. A lot of the significant life events for these characters happen in piecemeal flashbacks, emotions told to the reader, or characters speculating, rather than letting us see what’s happening in the moment. It’s not my favorite method of doing exposition.
I think the lack of in-the-moment developments, best exemplified by the relationship between Lucy and Bucket being underdeveloped with reader as witness, that prevented me from getting to the emotional place that was intended.
Economic Morality
We're learning Rich Kids Bad, Poor Kids Good.
Everyone seems obsessed with the rich kids being dickholes, even adults seem obsessed, not with rich adults, but rich teens. This just KEEPS coming up in the book, and in a book where it appears that a bunch of people are being completely mind controlled by organic tech in their necks, implanted perhaps against their wishes or without their knowledge, I'm not sure why the poor characters are so focused on the socioeconomic disparity in the town. It just doesn't seem important to me that the person who is trying to kill you after driving a truck through your living room has a fat wallet.
It's a little bit like I'm reading a book where all the rich kids in town were turned into zombies, not because they’re rich, because they happened to be in the place where the zombie gas was released, and they're pursuing the poor kids, who weren't turned into zombies for some reason, and the distinction of rich and poor is still brought up repeatedly. Like...does this matter at this point?
And one of the zombified kids, it’s like the narrator thinks that he’s really just acting out his natural instincts because he’s THAT MUCH of a dillhole. I mean...it just feels like the book is trying really hard to push the rich/poor disparity as a critical point, but in this book’s context, it doesn't really connect.
Back to the 80’s
An 80’s, perhaps early 90’s plot point, was often about the military or more vaguely, the government, doing something evil.
In Short Circuit, the government is designing robots to fight wars for us. When one is struck by lightning and becomes sentient...the government goes balls out trying to destroy it.
Now, how does that make sense? Wouldn’t they want to see what’s going on here? If this one robot became sentient by a random injection of electrical energy, wouldn’t they want to A) Figure out how that happened, and B) Either prevent it in the future or use it to their advantage?
Maybe ET started this whole thing. But the deal with ET is that it’s a kids’ movie. It’s from a kid’s perspective. All the adults are violent morons. However, watching it as an adult, you...kinda see where the adults are coming from. A completely alien creature? What are they supposed to do, just let him live in a kid’s bedroom, alien sleepover style? Can ET survive on Earth food? Is there acid coursing beneath his skin, like some other aliens we’ve seen in films? The adults are wrong to not listen, but they’re not totally wrong to be concerned that a child’s bedroom is not the right place for an alien visitor to reside.
The Loop also has this throwback plot, the idea of the government (or big, powerful corporation, it’s kinda both) doing something that completely violates human rights, and it seems to be happening for no clear reason.
I’m not sure what the goal was, exactly, in creating these bio-tech parasites that connect people to each other. What was the purpose? What was the intention?
It seems like the suggestion is that this is a bioweapon, but...it doesn’t make sense. Based on what happens in the book, what’s the utility of a bioweapon like this compared to an atomic weapon, which is used to stop the spread of the bioweapon at the end of the book? Or, wouldn’t a virus (ahem, 2020) be just as effective without causing, I don’t know, the end of the human race?
If you’ve read The Terminal Man, you might recognize elements in The Loop, but in The Terminal Man, there’s a clear motive. Scientists were trying to cure a guy of a condition with what’s essentially a neurological pacemaker. And then it goes south in an unexpected but logical way.
The Loop only makes sense if you are already of the opinion that big corporations and government are evil and will do things, expending a lot of resources, just to fuck with people. I DO think both entities make horrible decisions that don’t benefit humanity, but at the same time, I think these are economically-based, or they’re the product of stupid decisions, not evil ones. I think, if it would be equally profitable, corporations and government would do the right thing. I don’t tend to believe that Google is working on some super secret biotech thingie meant to turn us into zombies. They don’t have to! We all know that internet shit is HORRIBLE for us, mentally, but we still dive back in.
Okay, now I’M getting all moral.
The OTHER Moral
Towards the end, I got it.
This is like a social media thing.
I’ll admit, that helped the story some. And maybe I’m thick, but I didn’t quite get there early enough to enjoy it.
And the moral is lost, for me, when the stand-in for social media is so obviously destructive and seems to provide no benefit whatsoever. I’m not sure why people would opt into The Loop’s biotech, and that’s the sort of insidious thing about social media: people choose to use it. Removing that element of choice makes the whole thing less impactful.
And why the scientists working on the thing would inject their children as test subjects is a complete mystery. Like...I get that maybe there’s an asshole who hates his stepson or something, but it seems to me that there is zero proposed benefit?
I sort of get it, and I think this angle improves the story, but I think being forced in a very literal sense to engage with “social media” changes the metaphor to be something different.
I also feel the metaphor doesn’t work as well alongside the rich/poor disparity. Certainly wealthier teens bullying other teens on social media is a thing, but it’s been my experience that bullying online is sometimes along class lines, sometimes racial, and sometimes, it’s just there. It doesn’t even really make sense. It’s often perpetrated by people who victimize their former friends as opposed to picking on one kid or another.
And, I think an important aspect of the social media metaphor is that one can opt out at any time, and people have such a hard time doing so. That aspect is not present in The Loop.
The Wrap-Up
I have three problems with the end:
Superman Returns
The thing I dislike about Superman Returns is that Superman gets the shit kicked out of him by Kal Penn on an island made of Kryptonite. Which makes sense. THEN, because he uses his willpower, Superman is able to throw the same island into space. I mean no disrespect to Kal Penn, but the strength disparity between getting housed by Kal Penn and throwing a large-ish island into space is totally incalculable. But Superman does it because he WANTS to badly enough.
Lucy is able to overpower the parasite because she’s...mentally strong? In a way that NO other person seems to be. Having a solution based on a vague level of “wanting it bad enough” doesn’t do it for me. I get it, she overloads the thing by thinking about horrible stuff, overfeeding it in a way. I just felt like it seemed to come at a convenient moment, and why is she able to do it and no one else? Because she’s the gold medal winner in the suffering Olympics.
Eyeballs
Lucy figures out how to banish the parasite from her body. And it works! It makes sense based on the previous parts of the book! But, at that point, is there a need to blow up the entire city? If they know how to excise the parasite, and it just involves stabbing out your eye, doesn’t that drastically reduce the utility of the parasite as a bio-weapon, and doesn’t that mean that everyone who’s been zombified is recoverable? Would temporary blindness cause the parasites to leave?
Do the eyes have to be stabbed out, or can they just be temporarily disabled? And waitaminute...why can the parasite repair a body that was completely twisted around in a car wreck, but it can’t repair an eye?
I also felt this came very late in the story, and it seemed like a writer’s back door. We needed Lucy to be infected, and we also needed Lucid Lucy at the end to have our emotional moment. So in the book’s final moments, we needed her infected, then de-infected, all in pretty short order. I suspect the eyeball thing was added later to facilitate this, but I don’t think it’s necessary.
The Scale
The story goes from being a fairly isolated town to being Let’s Save The World. I don’t think that was necessary. The scale of saving humanity, as a whole, gets too big and too abstract for me, considering the scale leading up to that point.
And whenever this happens, it’s a little like the episode of Captain Planet when the bad guy makes a new drug, gets kids hooked on it, and the way they solve this problem is by taking away the bad guy’s written-down recipe. Couldn’t he just remake it? However he came up with the formula the first time, isn’t this totally replicable?
If the tech company was willing to infect American teenagers as a test and able to cover the whole thing up, is it likely that the data to re-create this exists outside of this one town?
When the scale gets really big, the solution has to grow in proportion, and oftentimes this results in a cop out, “kill the head vampire and all the others revert to human” scenario.
The Part I Didn’t Want to Say So I Saved It For Last
I think this book has garnered some attention because it’s got a strong female protagonist who’s a refugee and of a lower socioeconomic class (sort of, relative to her peers), and the story does some work to highlight the struggles that might be experienced by someone of that identity set who feels like an outsider.
I have NO problem with any of that. It just doesn’t do much for me in this particular book. It doesn’t seem to be essential to the plot or the characters, just a thing that’s grafted onto a story that would’ve been the same without it. Or, perhaps more accurately, you could replace her race with a weight problem or being homeschooled or basically anything that might put someone to the outer edges of popularity in a white, rich high school, and that would make the story the same.
I'm a little over the depiction of high school as being this popularity-based Lord of the Flies situation where you take your life in your hands for being unpopular. I was not popular in high school. I wasn't the lowest nerd, either. I, like most people, was just sort of there. And it's fine. It's really not that bad. You go to school, you have a few friends, and you get by. Then you leave and it's over. And by the time you're 30, you can't even remember the name of that jackoff who gave you a hard time in Algebra II.
I guess I’m just trying to delicately say that I think the protagonist’s demographics score points with some readers. For me, it’s neither a plus or minus. Just neutral.
spookybookz's review
2.0
This book was told to have stranger things vibes and maybe that set my expectations too high. The story itself is interesting but it was so very slow for me at times, I think I would of liked this more as a teenager. Not for me
nibmckay's review
3.0
I really enjoyed the storyline in this book however it really didn't grasp me and felt quite slow
adamsfall's review
5.0
This was one of the most gruesome and wild horror/scifi novels I’ve ever read, and I’ve read A LOT.
Lucy was such a fun character to learn about and experience the story through the eyes of.
This one gets my highest recommendation.
Lucy was such a fun character to learn about and experience the story through the eyes of.
This one gets my highest recommendation.
annasbookishbrew's review
4.0
4.5 Stars
In a small town somewhere in the US:
Inside a classroom, a boy goes crazy, attacking a classmate and then a teacher.
That day, two people die.
Lucy, tormented by the traumatic experiences she had witnessed during class, noticed something that no one else saw. This makes her doubt that everything was a "normal" violent act. A few days later, at a party, the events escalate and with them Lucy's whole world changes in an instant.
------ SPOILERS------------
This book was a wild ride! I firstly didn't expect the level of violence in the book. When I received it I thought it would be YA and as far as I know many people believe that. It definitely isn't! The violent scenes are extremely explicit and nothing for a weak stomach. But - I appreciate that the book went there. It didn't hide any gruesome details and made the story so much more real.
What I thought about the story in general:
The story reminded me a little of - The Troop - , not because what actually happened but because of the writing style. (mind you: I read the troop in german and the loop in english). We follow the story from Lucys perspective and I really liked her as a character. She had to deal with abuse & being left alone in her family home and later being bullied at school. Her trauma is very visible and we learn about her PTSD along the way as it get's triggered quite often. We also experience a conflict of emotions with her. She has a lot of anger inside her, but at the same time she is a very rational thinking individual that wants to hurt nobody. And this is what made her really interesting when certain situations unfolded because I wasn't sure wether Lucy would do something stupid or not.
The concept was very interesting. I love SciFi Horror Storylines and IMTECH at the center was a company I was intrigued in from the start. Not gonna lie, the story went over my head a few times so I was happy that Steve joined the bunch at some point that explained everything scientific for dummies (a.k.a me).
The use of a conspiracy podcast was super smart and I loved this aspect because it made the story more real. The podcast host was also written so realistically. I felt like hearing the podcast for real and loved that feeling.
The friendship with the boys, especially bucket. LOVED IT! I want to read more books with a male female friendship like this one. Bucket was such a sensible, smart person and his banter with Lucy was great.
And then THE END: Like wow!
It was beautifully written and so freaking crazy / sad. I didn't trust Brewer from the beginning but I learned to really like him and he was a very powerful ally at the end I was so glad Lucy had.
Why not 5 stars
As mentioned, some scenes went way over my head. I really didn't understand all aspects of IMTECHs product, why they couldn't intervene earlier and where did they get it from. Maybe the reader shouldn't know everything but I wanted more I guess.
Also some scenes I found to be quite boring. In the middle of the book when Lucy was driving in a car for like 30 pages. It just didn't grip me and I also couldn't see how a lot of it was benefitial for the story.
In a small town somewhere in the US:
Inside a classroom, a boy goes crazy, attacking a classmate and then a teacher.
That day, two people die.
Lucy, tormented by the traumatic experiences she had witnessed during class, noticed something that no one else saw. This makes her doubt that everything was a "normal" violent act. A few days later, at a party, the events escalate and with them Lucy's whole world changes in an instant.
------ SPOILERS------------
This book was a wild ride! I firstly didn't expect the level of violence in the book. When I received it I thought it would be YA and as far as I know many people believe that. It definitely isn't! The violent scenes are extremely explicit and nothing for a weak stomach. But - I appreciate that the book went there. It didn't hide any gruesome details and made the story so much more real.
What I thought about the story in general:
The story reminded me a little of - The Troop - , not because what actually happened but because of the writing style. (mind you: I read the troop in german and the loop in english). We follow the story from Lucys perspective and I really liked her as a character. She had to deal with abuse & being left alone in her family home and later being bullied at school. Her trauma is very visible and we learn about her PTSD along the way as it get's triggered quite often. We also experience a conflict of emotions with her. She has a lot of anger inside her, but at the same time she is a very rational thinking individual that wants to hurt nobody. And this is what made her really interesting when certain situations unfolded because I wasn't sure wether Lucy would do something stupid or not.
The concept was very interesting. I love SciFi Horror Storylines and IMTECH at the center was a company I was intrigued in from the start. Not gonna lie, the story went over my head a few times so I was happy that Steve joined the bunch at some point that explained everything scientific for dummies (a.k.a me).
The use of a conspiracy podcast was super smart and I loved this aspect because it made the story more real. The podcast host was also written so realistically. I felt like hearing the podcast for real and loved that feeling.
The friendship with the boys, especially bucket. LOVED IT! I want to read more books with a male female friendship like this one. Bucket was such a sensible, smart person and his banter with Lucy was great.
And then THE END: Like wow!
It was beautifully written and so freaking crazy / sad. I didn't trust Brewer from the beginning but I learned to really like him and he was a very powerful ally at the end I was so glad Lucy had.
Why not 5 stars
As mentioned, some scenes went way over my head. I really didn't understand all aspects of IMTECHs product, why they couldn't intervene earlier and where did they get it from. Maybe the reader shouldn't know everything but I wanted more I guess.
Also some scenes I found to be quite boring. In the middle of the book when Lucy was driving in a car for like 30 pages. It just didn't grip me and I also couldn't see how a lot of it was benefitial for the story.
mboyette252's review
5.0
Beat book I’ve read all year! I know that comes with a heavy toll, but this book did it for me. Execution was top notch, there were moments that I felt my own chest tighten, and the ending was beautiful. I have not been able to say I liked the ending this year but to one other book. Take that for what it means to you.
beytwice's review against another edition
4.0
Comparing The Loop to Stranger Things is entirely a discredit to both parties — aside from the 'teens fighting unknown entity in a kooky town' trope at a very superficial level, I didn't feel any strong connection in atsmophere or narrative between the two. This read more as if Michael Crichton and David Cronenberg had a book baby; biotech meets body horror in a weird pandemic-like disaster that just spirals to unknown grounds. I loved the directions The Loop was unafraid to go in (cemetery car chase sequences, emotional cords being struck, and killer octopi?!) and my only real critique is the lengthy sections of exposition that I feel could have been divulged in a smoother and smarter manner. The ending however was absolutely killer and I loved the writing style as a whole! A very easy book to reread and annotate entire passages throughout.
inkdrinker19's review
adventurous
dark
funny
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5