The Loop has almost everything that is good about young adult books, but also all of the bad. Ben Oliver starts with a somewhat silly idea, derivative from The Matrix, where people can be used as batteries, describes an endless prison of death row inmates that get to delay their sentence every now and then by accepting being guinea pigs for an extension of their life and controlled by a combination of heartless psychopaths and undefeatable technology. So far so good. Then he presents cardboard shallow characters that are inconsistent, dimwitted and bland and asks us to care about anything that happens to them. And of course this crap is part of a trilogy! He leaves literal (Chekov's?) weapons lying around and people too dumb to remember they were there to begin with. Ugh! As for the author, the only contact for a Ben Oliver I could find was a twitter account that has since been closed. When you dump every cliché of YA novels, then refuse to follow up with any of reason, adventure or…
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