Sarah Lariviere

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.… (mais)

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)… (mais)