Time Travel for Love and Profit

by Sarah Lariviere

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).

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?

Genres: Time Travel, Young Adult, Science Fiction, Fiction, Romance, Contemporary, Coming Of Age

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 26, 2021

About the author

Sarah grew up in Champaign, Illinois, graduated with a degree in theater from Oberlin College and has a master’s degree in social work from Hunter College in New York City, where she specialized in casework with children and families. She lives in Los Angeles, California, where she is inspired by her wild garden and listening to her son play guitar.

Reviews

[human · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley and Knopf Books for Young Readers for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

(actual rating: 3.5/5)

Even though this book is really weird in that it doesn't always make a whole lot of sense, I actually enjoyed reading it.

When Nephele Weather's best friend abruptly drops her, leaving her with the worst freshman year ever, Nephele is left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands. Being the science and math genius that she is, she decides to create an app that will allow send her into the past and redo her freshman year. Except, instead of sending her to the past, Nephele loops, keeping her in freshman year while everyone around her moves on, seemingly forgetting about her. Soon enough, it's been ten years, and Nephele's finally starting to figure out where she went wrong, with the help of Jazz, her charming classmate. Only, now that she's figuring out how to go back, she has to ask herself: does she really want to?

The beginning of this book was quite interesting and really set the scene with how things were going to go. I immediately sympathized with Nephele, and her feeling like a fish out of water. I also really liked her character arc, and the dynamic that she had with other characters. While there were some good parts, I felt that this book was better in idea than execution.

For one, there's the writing style. Even though it seemed okay at first, the conversational style of the writing got a bit annoying after some time. I will be the first to admit that even though the math/science-y aspects of this book were explained in not-too-great detail, and in fairly simple language, I didn't understand what was being said and felt like they were more like info-dumps than anything else.

A really big problem that I had with this book is the fact that it didn't really get better/clearer as you read it, at least until the very end. Especially for the middle third of the book, everything felt really choppy and nothing truly made sense. Random things were happening that did little to advance the plot or add anything meaningful to the book. It was actually a bit boring to read through those parts, because I didn't understand what was going on exactly, either.

Other than that, I really enjoyed Nephele's character arc as a whole and the relationships she had with the other characters. I loved reading about how Nephele learned so much about herself and eventually grew into the person that she truly was because she met the right people. The dynamic that she had with her friends was also really sweet. The way that she went from being totally cocooned inside of herself, lashing out and pushing others away before they could hurt her, to opening up to her friends and falling in love with Jazz was adorable. I also found the way that the author was able to include characters from when Nephele was initially a freshman to add to the overall character growth fascinating as well.

Overall, this book was pretty short and sweet, and while there were some issues that I had with it, I loved the 'Groundhog Day' twist that was put on everything. I would definitely recommend it to others who like time travel with a coming-of-age theme in an MG-to-almost-YA book.

[Ariel · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this might have been the strangest book I’ve ever read. I’m really not sure where even to begin with this review so forgive me if it’s a little discombobulated.

Strange….so strange. I thought the more of this book I read, the more I would understand, but that wasn’t the case. The more I read, the more confused I became. The storyline, the main character, all of it was so odd. But, weirdly enough, I was so intrigued that I didn’t even realize I’d read half of the book until I did.

While we’re talking about the first half of the book, I should point out that it’s slow. The whole book is kinda slow, but the beginning is especially so. I think part of the pace has to do with the face that there is not too much dialogue exchanged. It’s mostly the main character talking to herself and thinking about things.

This book was written pretty well though. That’s why I decided to give it 2 stars instead of one. It was just everything else that I didn’t like.

Honestly, I’m not even sure what I just read. The synopsis only gives the smallest of glimpses into this book. If you like books with an odd voice and premise and don’t mind taking a wild mind trip, then I guess this book is for you.

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

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[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nephele Weather a brilliant but awkward Greek 15 year old just had the worst Freshman year.  Living in Northern California her parents own a bookshop. Her father handed her a copy of the book Time Travel for Love and Profit.

She gets a great idea to go back and redo her Freshman year. She figures out how she can make this work with the help of the book. It works but.... it doesn't work. Having to redo her Freshman year, year after year as she tries to fix her quantum conundrum. 

This was definitely a fun read! I loved the authors note that she wrote the first draft right after having her baby, sitting in a cafe writing a draft while lactating through her shirt. Oh the ideas that came to me while I was on maternity leave! That sleep deprivation and extreme new love creates new eyes.

I don't understand the science of it but found it fun to listen to her trials as she kept failing and making it worse. Everyone would forget her and she would have to start over again. Everyone moved ahead a year in their lives as she moved back a year. In the tenth iteration of her trial she did meet someone she fell in love with who on his own quirkiness helped her figure out what she had missed. Also had her asking if she wanted to go back.

This is always my question when I ask myself if I would go back and do it again. I would want all the knowledge I have now but then I wouldn't have met the same people and I wouldn't have my babies. 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐💫 (rounded to 4)

Thank you @netgalley and @knopfteen for advanced electronic copy for my honest and voluntary review.
Releases today January 26th!

https://www.instagram.com/p/CKg5LjeA7Qg/
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[Jessica (Goldenfurpro) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This and other reviews can be found on The Psychotic Nerd

Actual Rating: 2.5 Stars

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 focused 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.

[Namera [The Literary Invertebrate] · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars, rounded up.

14-year-old Nephele Ann Weather is a genius. Such a genius that, when her best friend drops her in her first year of high school, her reaction is to create a time travel app that will allow her to redo freshman year. Only, something goes wrong, and while she does go back to being a freshman, everyone else around her is still aging normally. Now they just have huge gaps in her memory where she's supposed to be.

Nephele spends the next decade tweaking her app. In the meantime, she sees her old classmates grow up and get jobs, while she's eternally fourteen years old. But tenth time's the charm when she meets Jazz, who helps her iron out the kinks in her app.

Okay, so obviously books like this require colossal amounts of suspension of disbelief. The entire premise expects you to believe that Nephele can create a time travel AND programme it with a soul. Once I ignored all that, I quite enjoyed the rest of the book. The writing flows well and though Nephele can be annoying, it's in a believably teenagerish way.

The ending I thought was a little too abrupt, and this is basically the Book of People with Unrealistic Eye Colours (Nephele's are yellow and Jazz's are bloody purple) but on the whole, a quick and enjoyable read.

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[Elizabeth Plunkett · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fun story! This is the kind of book that makes you enjoy reading again! I think it would be a big hit with the early high schoolers who would be able to identify with that searching for you are and wanting to below feeling. It was funny, also made me consider the ethics of time travel and if it was positive or negative as well as the implications of AI. I loved seeing the different friends throughout the book and it was never what I expected. I’m not someone who usually likes sci-fi or fantasy, but this was exceptional! Must read, instant classic!

[emily sophia · Rating 1 out of 5]

terrible disgusting eew never read it. it will swallow you and poop you out

[Lauren loves llamas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Content warnings: parental abandonment (off-page), time travel causes memory holes leading to seizure-like reactions in MC’s parents

This book is weird, and not just in the way you expect a Groundhog-Day-esque time travel book to be.

“Breakthroughs are great, don’t get me wrong; but admitting that there were epic flaws in your original idea is hella painful. I’ve decided that science is like a sausage factory. Major discoveries are delicious, but you don’t want to know what’s in there.”

Nephele loves math. Frankly, she’s a genius. She knows that makes her weird and generally not like the other freshmen at her high school, but as long as she has her best friend Vera, she doesn’t care. And then, abruptly, Vera ghosts her, and the rest of the year only gets worse from there. But a new book at her dad’s bookshop seems to have the answer. If Nephele invents a time machine, she can go back in time and redo freshman year, making it so that Vera never drops her. Piece of cake, right? But while the resulting app – of course it’s an app – works, not everything goes the way Nephele expects. Can she fix whatever’s wrong before everyone she knows forgets about her?

“If this was how child prodigies thought, no wonder people thought we were abnormal. Clearly, I wasn’t. It’s not like my best friend was a black-and-white photograph or anything.”

At the beginning, I sympathized with Nephele. Being fourteen is hard, and while Nephele has a deep understanding of the beauty of mathematics, the illogical actions and feelings of the kids around her are about as incomprehensible to her as most of the math in the book was to me. I mean, after Vera dumps her, her best friend is a black and white photograph at her dad’s bookshop. It’s even worse that she’s eternally fourteen while everyone else ages up around her. The book has a very stream-of-conscious feel from Nephele’s first person POV, which can lead to odd passages like her full-on conversations with the photo. A large part of the first portion of the book is just her inner monologue while she tells us what’s happening. As the book progresses, though, it does give the reader a good view into Nephele’s character arc, which doesn’t really pick up until her tenth go-round when she finally starts interacting with her fellow students. She’s known she’s different from a young age, and as a result she pushes people away before they can reject her. She doesn’t understand how her dogged determination to regain Vera’s friendship is just another extension of that rejection. I did like seeing how her friends drew her out and how she came to terms with her behavior. I also liked her determination to fix her app, even if the whole idea of a fourteen-year-old being able to code a working time travel app was pretty out there.

“Still—could I abandon my experiment prematurely just because I’d finally met a boy? Could I give up my last chance to un-hurt my parents?”

As for cons, the pacing is very jerky. At times it’s too fast, like when most of the first disastrous freshman year is skipped over or the multiple months she spends perfecting her app. At other times, it feels like it’s going too slow, like the extended monologue sections where she’s recapping her work with the app. It would’ve been nice to have things broken up with a little more dialogue, even if it was with a photograph! The most annoying thing to me, however, was the the continuous tired jabs at romance novels, which probably explains why the romance in the book is so lackluster and trite. I liked Jazz as a character (albeit, a manic pixie dreamboy character with purple eyes) but just couldn’t buy into the romance, which took a lot of oomph out of the final bits of the story.

Overall, while the concept was interesting, the book just didn’t work out for me.

I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

[AquaMoon]

Sure, this book sounded kind of awesome. In theory.

In reality, however...

The concept of time travel and, more importantly, time loops are tricksy business to base a book around. An author has to make sure the story stays fresh and interesting, despite the Traveler repeating situations and scenarios again and again whilst they work out how to break the loop. Because tedium is a surefire way to make a reader abandon a book.

Some stories absolutely nail time loops. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, for example (we're talking the book, not the disaster of a movie, no disrespect to Tim Burton). Riggs' story was awesome simply because it took such a unique approach to the concept. Also, the time travel/loop was kind of secondary to the larger story. Plus, there was mystery and monsters and romance and unsettling photos that were on par with the artwork from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark when it came to creepiness.

Others, like this story, try...and don't quite get it.

Perhaps one would say I'm being unfair, coming to such a conclusion without having read the book in its entirety. But the fact that I couldn't even get into said book should be all the support my argument requires. To be fair, I'm obtaining from giving it a "starred" rating.

Hear me out:

The first several chapters leading up to the initial trip into the past were so freaking SLOW! For a book about time travel/loops and quantum physics, the beginning of this story was exceptionally dull. Even after the time travel bit, the story dragged.

Also, I just didn't like Nephele "rhymes with especially". Not only is she a hater of sparkles and antisocial to the max, but her classmates are right: She IS weird. Not that I justify bullying, because I don't. Absolutely NOT!! But Girl is just weird. And it seems she goes way out of her way to be this way. Or, more like it, the author went out of her way to craft a character so odd and so quirky and so different that no reader would be able to relate to her. Nephele is so odd that, if she were to be plucked out of this book and dropped into a John Green novel, she would become the Manic Pixie Dream Girl love interest of the overly-Emo, Vonnegut-reading protagonist. Maybe this over-the-top weirdness was meant to be a baseline for the transformation to normalcy the character planned to undergo. Make no mistake: I love me a quirky character, but this one just didn't work for me. (Keep in mind: This assessment on the Strangeness and Unusualness of Nephele is coming from someone who IS, in fact, Strange and Unusual and who reveres going against the norm and being yourself. So I know what I'm talking about).

Lastly, based on what I read, I'm not sure of the audience for this book. Nephele is in high school, which would lead the average librarian to not think twice about popping it onto the "Teen" shelf with all the other Twilights and Hunger Games. But in reading several chapters, I, an average librarian, am not so sure. Nephele's voice is so young! Despite how brainy she seems, her actual voice is so immature that it makes her sound as if she's entering 6th grade instead of Freshman year.

Disappointingly DNF.

p.s. Who hates sparkles? I ask you...

p.s.s. Also, anyone who invents a Time Travel app is sure to get a visit from the Men in Black...and then vanish without a trace.

[Max Shinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am working on reading every time loop book ever published, hence why I preordered this book.

This book was a lot of fun. There were several aspects I enjoyed:

- The references/allusions were a joy (see below)
- I love Nephele's character. It's not a perspective you seen often, and she is lovable in a very distinct way.
- The humor is fantastic. I was laughing out loud constantly while reading.
- The time loop mechanics were innovative. Most YA time loop books follow the same template, but this book was a new take on it.
- I loved the inclusion of the knot diagrams. (That being said, I'm not a knot theory expert, but aren't the diagrams shown actually links, not knots? Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.)
- I like the wink about how Nephele, in a different timeline, might have met herself as misanthrope Marla. It gives the impression that this universe is more complicated than the author is revealing.

A few things that could have been better:

- Nephele made a few comments which were jarring and out of character, which made it hard to me to make her a real person in my mind, e.g. about the size of the carpet in the classroom and the use of the metric system. Likewise, the combinations of fields of math she liked were odd, and kids (and adults) who like math as much as Nephele does do not talk about math in the same way she does.
- The plot would suddenly change based on something the reader didn't know was in the realm of possibility in the book's universe. None of the major plot points could be predicted by an attentive reader, because they used features of the world which were made up on the spot to allow the plot point, e.g. Dirk Angus having a soul. Some people like this style of writing, but it's not my cup of tea.
- I have a hard time understanding the ending. How was she hurting her parents by going back in time rather than helping them? Will they continue to have absence seizures for the rest of their lives? How will she survive with no access to her birth certificate or knowledge of what year it is? While it may be best not to make the time machine public knowledge, why not at least consider doing some good with it before destroying it? How would she be hurting people if they wouldn't remember her? And why was it framed as a moral positive to give up on helping society in exchange for kissing a 14-year-old who is too ashamed of her to introduce her to his family?

Overall, though, my favorite part of this book was all the hidden references/allusions. My favorite was the nod to Ken Grimwood's Replay through the William Blake poem. However, the most creative one I noticed was the solfege reference: "Fi" in solfege is an augmented 4th, i.e. a tritone, the most pleasing form of dissonance. Besides the fact that tritones are music's stimplest example of a Hofstadter-style "strange loop" (which the book claims gives you a soul), tritones are central to jazz music.

I don't normally write reviews, but I was curious what other references people found, and wanted to encourage people to chime in with comments on other references they noticed. I know there are lots I missed, so I'm curious what other people found.

[Matilda Andersson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Was I expecting too much when I picked up a book aimed towards an audience younger than myself? Probably. But I finished it and now I got some things to say about it.

This book was... Disappointing. Now, I was not expecting a master piece but I was expecting something more. First of all, I never really liked Nephele. The author seemed to try to make her seem quirky and smart but it was mostly annoying and made her really unlikeable. And she never really changed throughout the book.
Secondly, the time travel plot was done very poorly. The reason I picked this book up was with the promise of time travelling, but I was so disappointed.
Lastly, I would like to adress the love interest. It never bodes well when the author writes out that banter is happening. Most of the dialogue Nephele had with LI and friends felt unnatural and forced. Throughout the book I was asking myself what made this guy special. Then I realised that while he was fourteen she was mentally twenty-four and she had even from the beginning seemed more mature than others her age. So I don't understand why she would be interested in a fourteen year old, who frankly didn't seem to be that different from his peers?

[Laura Sanner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was trippy and way to smart for me. A great read for sci fi or time travel fans!

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

A huge thank you to NetGalley, Random House Children's, and Sarah Lariviere for sending me an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

This was a solid read. My goodness, what a ride. I'll be the first to say, it's a lot of math and science and a whole lot of trial and error, but this book was fascinating to me. I was hooked from the first page and I rode that all the way through this book. I had to know how Nephele's story played out.

The setting was beautiful and as unique as our main character Nephele. Named after an obscure character in Greek mythology- a freaking cloud nyph- Nephele has always been a bit odd; Name aside, she's got an obsession and an understanding of math that marks her as a genius at a very young age. She's always been an outcast and naturally wants to make some real friends, wants to have a do-over to become more well-liked. So when a time travel book comes along, she latches onto the idea and starts to build a time machine. What could go wrong?

This book was full of life lessons, hard truths, and a lot of growing up and realizing you'd been doing the wrong thing all along. This was one hell of a coming 0f age story.

[Becky · Rating 2 out of 5]

First sentence: The day my best friend, Vera Knight, dumped me, I didn't know what happened.

Premise/plot: Nephele Weather, our fourteen year old heroine, has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. And it all starts when her father hands her a self-published book, time Travel for Love and Profit.

Nephele decides to invent a time machine so she can redo her freshman year of high school. No problem, right? How hard could designing an app to allow for time travel be? She's smart after all. That's part of the "problem" as she sees it. She doesn't fit in with the other kids because she's so super-aggressively-weird. If she can just relive her freshman year only cooler and better then surely her life will be better, right?!

Long story short--and I don't feel bad spoiling because anything in the jacket copy is fair game--she loops (alone) TEN TIMES through her entire freshman year. Each year she spends dedicated almost exclusively to fixing the bugs and flaws in her program, Dirk Angus. One of the program's main flaws is that it is destroying her parents' brains--so there's that. Her parents are literally the only people in the world that retain any sort of memory of her.

Will Nephele ever grow up?

My thoughts: I wanted to love this one. I love time travel stories. The premise sounds reasonably entertaining. I imagined a time loop via Groundhog's Day or Window of Opportunity (Stargate) or even Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver. She's not struggling to get out of the loop--she's purposefully looping even though she sees the damaging effects it is having on her parents. And here's the thing, looping isn't making her happier. It's not. If her mission was to have a better life, it's failing in every sense of the word. But she's stubborn and persistent that even though I've tried before and failed, this next time will be different.

It is very much a premise driven novel.

Nephele was not a likeable person (in my opinion). My personal observation is that what time she did spend reading, she spent reading the wrong books. If she'd read better books, I'm not sure she'd have had to loop ten times. I'm not sure she'd even have looped once. Because books can ground you. If she'd read even a handful of MG or YA books, she'd have learned everything she needed to know to face her sophomore year the first time. She'd have known that she would find her people--even if took a while. She would have realized that there is life outside of high school. She'd have learned that some things just don't matter in the long run. She could have spent her time learning to love herself.

I do think it is thought-provoking in a way. It could have gone many different ways. For example, she could have wanted to time travel to post-high school. To avoid the stresses of high school altogether. She really should have thought of *aging* in terms of time travel as well. But no matter what she chose to do with the app--I think she was destined to fail. Because every loop was proof that she didn't love herself--or her life--the way it was.

The ending. I am NOT happy with the ending.


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I do NOT trust the new evolved APP. I don't. And I'm almost mad at Jazz (aka Jeremiah) for encouraging her to give the AI a "soul." The book ventured into horror there at the end...and I think our main character is clueless and doesn't realize it.

[Jenn Belden · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars.

This book has NOT gotten enough hype. It is a lovely quirky YA sci-fi that still manages to feel a bit like a YA contemporary. The approach to time travel and the feel of a teenage Groundhog Day was wonderful and entertaining. I loved this story and found it to be super cute.

The writing is quippy and comfortable, it just has a lilting and happy feel to it. Almost jaunty. It's fantastic and make me just fly through my read. It was nearly a conversational feel and I really enjoyed it. The plot was well structured, but did have a bit of a drag to it in the middle. For me that wasn't an issue because I was already invested pretty well in Fi's journey, but some readers who don't connect as quickly to the main character may have a little trouble pushing through certain sections.

The characters are great. Nephele (Fi) is a brilliant young girl with anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. You know...teenage angsty kind of stuff. She feels real and is just super lovable. Her character arc through the narrative is great and I really enjoyed watching her go through so many trials and discovering pieces about herself. The character development and her dynamic nature just made Fi a character that I would like to wrap up in a hug. She's wonderful.

The other characters are good, but Fi clearly shines. Her relationship with Jazz is the cutest friendship and I just loved the way he slowly weaved his way into her life. I also appreciated that Fi's parents were both present, written in a supportive way, and that she had a relationship with them that wasn't constantly at odds. This seems to be rare in YA reads. I will say that these characters were not developed quite as strongly and the parents did feel a bit wispy.

This book was perfect for me at the time I read it. Adorable, uplifting, rewarding, and just a good all around experience.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this novel from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. *

[Jenny Ells Chou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nephele’s first year of high school is such a train wreck. The nickname Neffa-Freak catches on with the bullies and her BFF dumps her to go hang out with girls who aren’t called “aggressively weird”. For most kids, wishing for a do-over would be nothing but a dream. But not for a math genius who takes AP calculus with the seniors (and helps them with their homework). Inventing a time travel app takes the better part of summer vacation, and it works - sort of. While everyone else moves ahead, Nephele gets stuck in a time loop of year after year of ninth grade, joined each time with a new crop of last year’s eighth graders. Even during her first round of ninth grade, Nephele has the cynical voice of someone older than her years, and her sharp insights make for a laugh-out-loud read throughout the book. I’d guess that most of us could use more than four years to figure out high school (not that I’d go back!), and Nephele’s unwelcome odyssey turns poignant as she learns to embrace the endearingly weird aspects of her personality. Loved the time travel, but the coolest part? Watching Nephele figure out what it means to be a friend.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, truly so delightful and unique. It read to me like AS King without the distress, which will make sense if you are as big a fan of AS King as I am. I would have loved for someone to have given me this book in high school. I am glad it exists.

[Karlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book a lot. I want to love this book but the ending was a bit flat for me. Four stars however is a great rating for me best explained by a quote From the book itself…

“It’s a good book. It’s one of those books that keep you turning the pages, even though there are no actual characters, and you can’t explain what it’s about, and you wouldn’t recommend it to anyone because they might not like it as much as you do, which would spoil the beauty of it, especially if they pointed out any logical flaws or sketchy theories or pseudoscience, which you were of course completely aware of, but happy to ignore temporarily for personal reasons.”

It quoted exactly how I feel about my love for time travel books.

[Kris Sellgren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful young adult science fiction novel about a 14 year old girl who invents a time machine which only partly works. The result: she has to live through the first year of high school over and over, stuck at age 14, while everyone around her is getting older. Every year, she tries to fix the time machine, but stays stuck. By some miracle, the tenth time through 9th grade she actually makes friends and acquires a boyfriend. She thinks she has finally fixed the time machine. But if she travels back correctly, to the first day of tenth grade, all her friends and her boyfriend will be toddlers. Will she choose science and fame or love and friendship? The twisty mind of the heroine, and her coping mechanisms, are an inventive delight.

[Martina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Time Travel for Love & Profit was a strange book.

I considered stopping a lot of times but curiosity got the best of me.
I did skim through a lot of it though.
I found it to be confusing no matter how much I kept reading.
The concept of this book is something I’m really interested in which is why I picked this up.

I was not a fan of the characters. We mostly only hear our main character inner monologue and she was so odd that I felt lost half the time. The rest of the characters felt very robotic.

The writing I did enjoy and it’s what made it easier to keep reading.

Overall I was disappointed in this novel.

[K · Rating 1 out of 5]

tbh i hated it. only book i have EVER dnf

[Katherine Sapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good soup

[Alyssa Terrill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cute and quirky, this was definitely a teen book. It was the perfect audiobook to listen to at work.

[Sean Randall · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I spent a lot of the reading time here thinking "no! Don't do it again!" And wondering just how well having only a photograph for company would work. But on balance, having turned the last page, I was surprisingly satisfied even though (spoiler alert) nothing is resolved at the end of the story.

I don't know how, quite, that it is possible - that I am at once cognisant of the fact that none of the plot points set up in the story are resolved in any meaningful way yet confident that our incredibly weird main character has absorbed some sort of life lesson and come through this whole thing not unchanged. But I am. I am, and that is weird. And this book shines a weirdly bright light on my soul and that is ... strangely appealing.

[Angela Gilbert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this perfect-for-me book. It was hilarious and absurd, just how I like it. The writing is great, the story is interesting and the narrator of the audiobook is Kristen Sieh, who I really enjoy listening to.

I highly recommend this, even if you don’t normally enjoy YA fiction. I’ll definitely read it again. In fact, I think I’ll read it again right now.

Favorite Quotes:

Dodging Cupid’s arrows required supreme diligence.

His laugh was low and rich like something delicious.

We shared a look that instantly went from neutral to its imperative that we kiss.

It was my tenth 15th birthday and I’d finally made friends.

I had everything I’d ever wanted expect a functioning time ship and a kiss.

Soon I’d have a functioning time ship . . . and a kiss served no purpose at all. This was the speech I gave myself when Jeremiah was so close to me I felt like he was made of magnets.

I looked around for something that was not a boy to hold on to. What did I want? Something solid and comforting, like a burrito.

Don’t turn me into that guy! The one who hijacks the future of the girl who is about to kick a colossal boatload of butts.

Jeremiah didn’t kiss me goodbye but when we smiled at each other I knew we’d both be fine. We’d met, there was something between us, we’d found it, now we had to go in two different directions. Time ends things. It was nobody’s fault.

Nephele: I want you to take me to the place where I can grow up and live the life I was supposed to live all along.
Toilette: According to my calculations Phe, there are many possible universes that meet those qualifications. Would you like me to choose one at random or do you have a preference?
Nephele: I was sure I did! I said. Now I’m confused again.
Toilette: You don’t want to make your own decision?
Nephele: I feel trapped! I want to go two directions at once. I feel stuck.
Toilette: That’s the difference between you and me, Phe. Feelings? I don’t have any. If I want to do something, I do it.

Wow! No feelings? What would that be like? I was heavy with feelings, like a pot of hot lead. My feelings were a constant distraction. I decided to try it, to force my feelings to drain out of me then decide what to do.

Are we all separate individual souls or is soul the thing that binds us, the thing that connects every living thing in the universe?

What was the purpose of a kiss? To tell someone you loved him, to tell someone that he was not alone. To be there for one person in this astonishing universe. A place that didn’t look out for you, and didn’t not. A place far too painful to face on your own.

Please, I’m a freaking Time Machine! I’ll back hand you both a couple centuries then punt you into the next millennium. When I hear the word “GO” you’ll be like “POOF!”

Trust me!?!?! Toilette laughed her bawdy laugh. Very bad idea! Although I am brilliant, I’m loosey goosey. I am amoral electric porridge.

Sometimes the incidental finding turns out to be the only one that matters.

[Samantha Louise]

Thank you once again Netgalley for this eARC.

Time Travel for Love and Profit starts out with mathematical prodigy Nephele "Fi" Weather starting freshman year with her best friend Vera giving her the cold shoulder to hang out with the popular kids. Nephele spends the rest of the year going through the general high school hell, but the act of Vera leaving her inspires her: what if she could build a time machine, go back to the first day of freshman year, and become the kind of person Vera wouldn't abandon, the kind everyone would like? Using the power of code, Nephele succeeds...sort of....

The story just didn't do it for me. The humor added a strong voice to the main character, but felt like a lot of unamusing fluff to me. It felt like a caricature of high school complete with beautiful yet cruel popular and mid-level-food-chain kids; outcasts made to come across as gross; and Nephele, a prickly genius. The pacing was off: the first half of the story was dragged along by Nephele's need to perfect the time machine and break out of the time loop and not much else. My interest wasn't piqued until Nephele makes friends.

It also ended sort of abruptly. It felt sort of cheap that after fixing the time machine, Nephele decides to stay in a pretty perfect future with her partner Jazz and her friends, a future she stole at the cost of hurting others, instead of going back to the day before the start of sophomore year, where she was before inventing the time machine, where she could apply what she learned over her 10 years of freshman years to show that she had changed for the better.

I liked a few things about the story though. A story about a genius trying to invent a time machine was sure to give me words and concepts I'd never heard of to Google: quasars, quantum foam, fractals, the word 'brobdingnagian', and more. I said earlier that I didn't find the humor funny, but I want to admit again that it did give Nephele a very strong voice and gave me a sense of what her character was about. I appreciated the little twist that I did not see coming that the blurb reveals (the blurb says too much unfortunately) and it was clear that it helped develop Nephele's character. I liked the descriptions of living on the California coast. Also, the ending was somewhat unexpected.

Even though this wasn't my favorite thing I've read recently, I think someone who likes slower-paced, lighthearted, younger YA coming-of-age with a touch of sci-fi and prickly romance-novel-and-math-loving heroines who dream of being kissed and saving the world would appreciate this story.

[Lucy Seo]

This book is about a girl named Nephele who invents a time machine on her phone to go back to her freshman year where she hopes to make friends. Instead of being able to make friends, Nephele is stuck in a loophole where she's the only one time traveling and her parents are losing memory of her actual first freshman year. This book is scientific fiction and it mostly focuses on Nephele's scientific mind and mathematic thoughts. I think people who are interested in math or science would love to read this book. Also, people who love fictional stories about time machines will enjoy reading this book too. However, I did not enjoy the book as much as I thought I would. The story was mostly about repetition; it was only about Nepehele being stuck in her loophole, being unable to achieve anything. There was too much unexplained science and math in this book, so it made it very hard for me as a reader to engage and understand a lot of things. In addition, Nepehle has a very weak character development throughout the book. The only reason she made the Time Machine app in the first place was to make friends. However, during every experiment, Nephele can't seem to fix her bad social skills. For example, on page 136, Nephele screams at Airika saying, "Will you stop being so nice to me, Airika? As soon as you get to know me, you're gonna realize you hate me and flee! Let us save us both some time." (Lariviere 136) However, later in the book, Nephele learns an important lesson. On page 304, Nephele says "My revelation is about choice. Just because a scientist can do something doesn't mean she should!" (Lariviere 304) Now that she has some friends and a boy she loves, she realizes that all her experiments are useless. With her boyfriend, Jazz, they together delete the last time machine. Overall, this story was quite fun to read because the author's idea of using a time machine in this story was fascinating. In conclusion, I would recommend this book to students who are either fascinated in science or students who are struggling to fit in at school.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I receive this from netgalley in exchange for a honest review, and it was a fun & quick read.

I loved the concept of this book. Who hasn't felt alienated at times, or been dropped by a friend you thought was someone who would be in your life forever? Plus, time travel? Sign me up!

It's definitely YA, and I'm no longer a youth myself so I can't say this for certain, but there were parts that felt like that scene in 30 Rock where Steve Buscemi wanders by with a skateboard and says "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?" Like, in my experience as a teen and now as an adult who occasionally interacts with teens, they aren't as shallow and stupid as slang or the media can make it seem. There were just a few jarring parts where the main character's inner monologue would be so insipid as she talked about her crush or her friends or love of math, RIGHT before she goes on to program her phone to travel through time. It just didn't ring true and took me out of the book more often than I would have liked.

Overall, the characters felt really two dimensional and the whole plot just didn't hold up to its potential. Whole years take chapters, but others take a paragraph, so you don't get the sense as a reader that time has passed and that Fi has grown emotionally. It feels like after a decade of trying, wouldn't Fi have made at least one other friend? Like, yes she's weird but even weird kids have friends. I also don't love that the friends she finally does make fall in her lap while she actively tries to push them away. I feel like there's a way to have a year or two of angst and throwing things away, but that to make friends or have any kind of relationship you need to learn to put yourself out there.

Still, it was a fun read where you keep hoping she does learn how to be okay with being yourself and putting yourself out there, and there's time travel, angst, and some PG-13 romance. Great for when you just need a quick escape!

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Time Travel for Love and Profit" is unique, fun, and profoundly moving for anyone who ever felt awkward and friendless as a kid and sought some way to redeem themselves in the eyes of their social peers.

Sarah L.’s story about a highschooler who spends her summer between 9th and 10th grades finding a way to go back in time and correct her social mistakes is an adventure that most of us can relate to, and it reminds us to circulate in the world so that we can find that special group of people who are *our* kind of weird. Aimed at 7th graders and up, the subject of the book that involves programming time travel seems like it would be a hit with anyone who is a fan of the organization Girls Who Code, while the themes of the book—loneliness, depression, anxiety, and difficulty fitting in and making friends—resonates with people from all backgrounds. I found the themes of redemption in the book particularly moving and encouraging.

The book inspired me to not only think about the mistakes I would like to correct if I could go back in time years or decades, but also what mistakes I could correct if I only went back in time one day or an hour. Then, I started thinking about how I would live my life if I imagined I was a time traveler redoing my life right now, in this instant. That is the thought-provoking power of this story.

Lariviere's "Time Travel for Love and Profit" is an impressive follow up to her first book "The Bad Kid." I have read the time travel book twice and recommended it to all of my friends, especially those who are a fan of books like "A Wrinkle in Time," "Einstein's Dream," or shows like "Doctor Who," "Quantum Leap," "Star Trek," and "Umbrella Academy" where time travel is a fascinating aspect of the plot that also highlights the emotional connections between the characters.

Read this book today! Or, go back in time and read it yesterday.