LOOP

Time-traveling, 23rd-century Bree creates a multiple-century mess that uncovers a conspiracy and, possibly, true love.

Bree is a Shifter: Her brain mutation enables time travel. Shifters follow strict rules during their Shifts, relying on microchips in their heads to direct and track their movements through time and to prevent something mysterious and bad. Bree’s mother is a time-traveling cautionary tale—theories behind her mysterious, Shift-related coma include a malfunctioning microchip, tampering or perhaps something more sinister. To pay her mother’s hospital bills, Bree takes an illegal smuggling job through time. She botches it, losing her parcel. When she returns to retrieve it, she discovers that she already has—or at least, her future self has, and also had a relationship with a handsome boy from the past—awkward! Cryptic warnings from her future self and Finn’s vow to protect her lead to her accidentally bringing Finn to the future-present. Trying to fix her mess, she follows her future self’s clues toward a threat to the integrity of time. Initially disorienting and then seemingly impossibly tangled, the complicated plot will leave readers dying to know if debut author Akins can pull all of her pieces into a cohesive whole—and she does so with aplomb.

Future and past selves provide a creative take on romance in a high-stakes, high-concept mystery that trusts its readers’ intelligence.