The Loop by Ben Oliver
Hello Books Lovers,
the book I will talk about today came out for Rizzoli last year, it is the first of a dystopian trilogy, and the sequel, entitled The Block, was also released a few months ago for Rizzoli. Now we have to wait for the third and final volume. The book in question is The Loop by Ben Oliver, dystopian, Young Adult, set in a future of those often seen in books of this genre – where technology reigns in a fake utopian world – with peaks of originality that will make you love each page.
The Loop itself is a kilometric-high prison controlled by drones, where anyone who enters will most likely not get out alive. Because the sentence of all, given to them by Happy, an AI, says that every 6 months they must participate in a mandatory postponement if they don’t want to face the death penalty. The postponement consists of implanting new technologies in the detainee’s body that sometimes work, but in most cases kill patients.
Luka Kane is our protagonist. Detained for a crime he didn’t commit, he’s been in the loop for 736 days, and has many more before his sentence ends, likely to be transferred to the block. Luka, every day, like all the other inmates, has an hour of fresh air to spend, alone, in a small garden outside his cell. This is where he made friends, but also enemies. And it was in this garden that he met his best friend, until he was taken for a postponement and never returned.
The thing that fascinated me most about Luka is that, having nothing else to do with being locked in the cell, and with the complicity of a kind guard, Wren, he starts reading, and falls in love with it. The wall of his cell is littered with paper books that no one uses anymore. He reads the lord of the rings and many other classics and loves them.
I’m curious to see if he will find a way to cultivate this love of his in the second volume as well. Returning instead to the plot, everything changes when the inmates, without exception, are forced to choose between a mandatory postponement and immediate death. The postponement does not convince anyone but what choice they have? They are divided into two groups, A and B. Those in B seem to get away with it, while those in Group A go crazy.
A war breaks out in the outside world. But the most shocking revelation comes at the end, when it turns out that the rulers are ruled themselves. This war will not lead to anything good. Luka was part of group B, but he who knows what will happen now that the world is no longer at peace as it has been for a long time.
I also leave you the official plot in case you want to read it. To speak of writing instead, the narration is in the first person, and I’ve found it quite fluent in most of the book. The only point of view is Luka’s, and given the failed reads I told you about on Instagram, The Loop was very satisfying.
It’s Luka Kane’s sixteenth birthday and he’s been inside The Loop for over two years. Every inmate is serving a death sentence with the option to push back their execution date by six months if they opt into “Delays”, scientific and medical experiments for the benefit of the elite in the outside world.But rumors of a war on the outside are spreading amongst the inmates, and before they know it, their tortuous routine becomes disrupted. The government issued rain stops falling. Strange things are happening to the guards. And it’s not long until the inmates are left alone inside the prison.Were the chains that shackled Luka to his cell the only instruments left to keep him safe? In a thrilling shift, he must overcome fellow prisoners hell-bent on killing him, the warden losing her mind, the rabid rats in the train tunnels, and a population turned into murderous monsters to try and break out of The Loop, save his family, and discover who is responsible for the chaos that has been inflicted upon the world.
