3.5 Stars

I received a free copy of this book from Pan Macmillan in exchange for an honest review.

When Jack meets Kate, he falls for her pretty quickly and he finally feels like he’s met the person he could be with for a long time. So when Kate suddenly dies, he’s left devastated. But then Jack finds himself in a time loop, reliving the same three months over and over again from the time he met Kate to the night she dies. Can he do anything differently to save her life?

Who doesn’t love a time loop story? Especially when the mission is to try and save someone’s life. I really liked the writing style of this book, and Jack’s narrative (mostly) - I flew through the story and found it very easy to read. However, I have to admit - I did not buy into this ‘love’ story at all. It just wasn’t one for me and i did not find myself rooting for it, which is kind of what you’re suppose to be doing.

I feel like I didn’t really grasp who Kate was as a person, and why Jack liked her so much. It felt for the most part to me that Jack liked her so much simply because she was a pretty girl who was talking to him, and who also liked cereal. And even though we were getting a lot of different versions of their relationship, I still didn’t get anything beyond surface level with her.

Also Jack just didn’t seem to be a particularly nice person when he was with Kate - he didn’t treat his friends and family well because he was so focused on trying to save Kate which is a little but understandable but also, be there for the people who love you too. And there was one really, really terrible thing Jack did in one of his loops that he wasn’t really apologetic for at all, and he didn’t really get properly pulled up on it if you ask me because oh there he goes into another loop and he gets to try again and erase his past misdemeanours.

I did love that this book is very diverse in that pretty much every character is a POC which was great. Jack’s parents are also real parents in that they’re there all he time, they want to know what he’s doing, where he’s going and reprimand him when they don’t or when he does wrong. They’re present and for YA we all know that doesn’t always happen. I also love the relationship they had with Franny.

This book touches on a lot of different issues, and while some are only a small point in the book in different loops, they’re all pretty powerful.

I don’t really think this book is a love story, it’s mostly a book about friendship and being there for your friends and knowing when they need you and just making sure they know you’re there. The real relationships explored were that between Jack and Jillian, and Jack and Franny and then all three together and I appreciated that a lot more than the Jack and Kate story that was failing to sell to me.