Are we in the Pacific Northwest? Are our leads Jewish? It must be a Rachel Lynn Solomon novel!
I kindly jest, because I find Solomon a pretty engaging writer, especially when she’s writing about younger characters (Today Tonight Tomorrow remains my favorite, I think). This time, we tackle ones of literature/media’s timeless, repetitive tropes in a college setting…
That’s right, what we have here is a garden variety time loop adventure.
The negatives, to get out of the way out, are that the time loop-iness of it all is probably the weakest element. I feel like these always work best with the least amount of explanation—the audience isn’t going to hear about how or why a time loop is happening and suddenly buy into the premise. You either do, and are happy with whatever outcomes occur, or you don’t, and no amount of pseudo-science will help. The entire diversion with finding an old, scrubbed-off-the-internet professor who studied time travel and time loops was unnecessary in the slightest and a bit distracting from the main gist of the story, which is how Barrett is going to learn and grow from this experience. Also her relationship with Miles, who is proof positive that the movie Passengers would have been 100x better from the perspective of Jennifer Lawrence rather than Chris Pratt [namely that the sucker punch of learning that he’d already kissed Barrett ahead of her first waking up in the time loop hits so much better when you’ve fallen for him alongside Barrett]. I’d probably also have been fine removing some of that third (fourth?) arc conflict post-time loop.
But in between all of this, Solomon has (to my admittedly no-longer young perspective) a good handle on the vagaries of being young and figuring yourself out. Happy to follow along with her work as they come!
