Nephele Weather a brilliant but awkward Greek 15 year old just had the worst Freshman year.  Living in Northern California her parents own a bookshop. Her father handed her a copy of the book Time Travel for Love and Profit.

She gets a great idea to go back and redo her Freshman year. She figures out how she can make this work with the help of the book. It works but.... it doesn't work. Having to redo her Freshman year, year after year as she tries to fix her quantum conundrum. 

This was definitely a fun read! I loved the authors note that she wrote the first draft right after having her baby, sitting in a cafe writing a draft while lactating through her shirt. Oh the ideas that came to me while I was on maternity leave! That sleep deprivation and extreme new love creates new eyes.

I don't understand the science of it but found it fun to listen to her trials as she kept failing and making it worse. Everyone would forget her and she would have to start over again. Everyone moved ahead a year in their lives as she moved back a year. In the tenth iteration of her trial she did meet someone she fell in love with who on his own quirkiness helped her figure out what she had missed. Also had her asking if she wanted to go back.

This is always my question when I ask myself if I would go back and do it again. I would want all the knowledge I have now but then I wouldn't have met the same people and I wouldn't have my babies. 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐💫 (rounded to 4)

Thank you @netgalley and @knopfteen for advanced electronic copy for my honest and voluntary review.

Freshman year starts terribly for math prodigy Nephele Weather, with her best friend ghosting her to join the cool kids, and it only goes downhill from there. So naturally she turns to math for a way out, inventing a time machine (or rather, phone app) to let her redo the year. And redo it again. And again, and again...

Time Travel for Love and Profit, a mix of Groundhog Day and All the Birds in the Sky, is as aggressively weird as its teen genius protagonist, and I loved every second of it. Is this book quirky? Absolutely. And all that quirkiness is completely delightful and heartfelt. I genuinely didn't expect to get as emotional as I did, but Nephele and her time loop tragedies are genuinely moving, as she struggles with the consequences of her actions, like staying a teenager forever while everyone else grows up and forgets her. Nephele's voice is unique and young - I seriously appreciated that this book managed to feel like the YOUNG part of YA, an age group that too often gets left behind between middle grade and 17/18-year-old YA. I can see how the stylistic writing and oddball characters might irritate some readers (although, I grew up with so many rainbow-suspender-wearing, poetry-quoting amateur magicians like Jazz, it's hard for me to take seriously anyone who says he's *too* quirky to be realistic), but I found them, and the book as a whole, playful, charming, and refreshing. It's a whimsical story, but one filled with heart.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance review copy!

I love time loops - because so often they allow a character to learn and grow and develop as they go through the same interactions over and over from different angles. That wasn’t the case here, Nephele is looping alone, poking holes in the memories of those around her to make her continued freshman status possible. She has to grow by seeing the unintended side effects hurt the people she loves, by losing someone who matters to her, and by learning to make friends.

Nephele has a lot going on. She’s a math genius, she talks to a photograph, and she’s run out of friends. So she decides, naturally, to create a time travel app to redo her Freshman year, so that she can be popular. It doesn’t work out how she thinks, and her life gets even more complicated.

This gave me some Coraline vibes, not spooky, but in that as her parents got impacted by the loops, she was sort of having to live with the approximation of her parents in what she thought she wanted.

I do recommend this if you love a Groundhog Day book, it was easy to read and plenty of fun.

This book is weird, and not just in the way you expect a Groundhog-Day-esque time travel book to be.

“Breakthroughs are great, don’t get me wrong; but admitting that there were epic flaws in your original idea is hella painful. I’ve decided that science is like a sausage factory. Major discoveries are delicious, but you don’t want to know what’s in there.”


Nephele loves math. Frankly, she’s a genius. She knows that makes her weird and generally not like the other freshmen at her high school, but as long as she has her best friend Vera, she doesn’t care. And then, abruptly, Vera ghosts her, and the rest of the year only gets worse from there. But a new book at her dad’s bookshop seems to have the answer. If Nephele invents a time machine, she can go back in time and redo freshman year, making it so that Vera never drops her. Piece of cake, right? But while the resulting app – of course it’s an app – works, not everything goes the way Nephele expects. Can she fix whatever’s wrong before everyone she knows forgets about her?

“If this was how child prodigies thought, no wonder people thought we were abnormal. Clearly, I wasn’t. It’s not like my best friend was a black-and-white photograph or anything.”


At the beginning, I sympathized with Nephele. Being fourteen is hard, and while Nephele has a deep understanding of the beauty of mathematics, the illogical actions and feelings of the kids around her are about as incomprehensible to her as most of the math in the book was to me. I mean, after Vera dumps her, her best friend is a black and white photograph at her dad’s bookshop. It’s even worse that she’s eternally fourteen while everyone else ages up around her. The book has a very stream-of-conscious feel from Nephele’s first person POV, which can lead to odd passages like her full-on conversations with the photo. A large part of the first portion of the book is just her inner monologue while she tells us what’s happening. As the book progresses, though, it does give the reader a good view into Nephele’s character arc, which doesn’t really pick up until her tenth go-round when she finally starts interacting with her fellow students. She’s known she’s different from a young age, and as a result she pushes people away before they can reject her. She doesn’t understand how her dogged determination to regain Vera’s friendship is just another extension of that rejection. I did like seeing how her friends drew her out and how she came to terms with her behavior. I also liked her determination to fix her app, even if the whole idea of a fourteen-year-old being able to code a working time travel app was pretty out there.

“Still—could I abandon my experiment prematurely just because I’d finally met a boy? Could I give up my last chance to un-hurt my parents?”


As for cons, the pacing is very jerky. At times it’s too fast, like when most of the first disastrous freshman year is skipped over or the multiple months she spends perfecting her app. At other times, it feels like it’s going too slow, like the extended monologue sections where she’s recapping her work with the app. It would’ve been nice to have things broken up with a little more dialogue, even if it was with a photograph! The most annoying thing to me, however, was the the continuous tired jabs at romance novels, which probably explains why the romance in the book is so lackluster and trite. I liked Jazz as a character (albeit, a manic pixie dreamboy character with purple eyes) but just couldn’t buy into the romance, which took a lot of oomph out of the final bits of the story.

Overall, while the concept was interesting, the book just didn’t work out for me.

I received an advance review copy of this book from NetGalley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Thank you to netgalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book is about a girl named Nephele (Fi) who invents a time machine so she can do freshmen year over again and save her friendship with her ex-best friend Vera. However, it is only Fi who repeats her freshmen year, all her other classmates moving forward and forgetting who she is entirely. The only ones who remember her are her parents, but their brains won’t let them recall that a year has passed but their daughter has remained the same. Fi continuously tries to repair her machine, doing freshmen year over and over but never making any connections with her peers out of fear the year will go as bad as her first. But her 10th freshmen year changes everything when she finally lets a few new people in her life...

First, I want to say how much I love the cover of this book, which is the original reason I was drawn to it. I also love the concept of this book and like that it plays with science fiction while still being very much a coming-of-age story.

Fi is a frustrating character, especially in the first half of the book—it is not just that she doesn’t age, she doesn’t have any character development. But she is also a deeply sympathetic character. Losing a best friend can be extremely difficult, especially when that friend goes on to contribute to the bullying of you by the rest of your classmates. Fi is just barely a teenager and stays that way the whole novel. Because of this, the book seems to fall almost between MG and YA and would definitely be most relatable for someone in the 12-15 age range.

Because of Fi’s lack of growth, the plot does take awhile to progress. For the majority of the novel, Fi is really the only character, with others somewhat floating around her but not becoming fully fleshed people. The friends Fi makes in her 10th freshmen year get more development but almost seemed to be created by Fi’s time loop because they were just the perfect amount of quirkiness to be Fi’s friends. Then again, it is not really who the friends were that was important, but Fi recognizing that she was worthy of the happiness that comes with friendship.

I found the ending unrealistic as an adult, but I imagine as a young teenager I would have loved it. And I think it was fitting given the lessons that Fi learns over her 10 years of time loops. Overall I really enjoyed the book, and I read it over the course of one day because it really gripped me. The writing was very well done, and I appreciate the work Lariviere did to explain theories of time travel (even though they definitely went over my head). I’d definitely recommend this book for young teenagers or other adults who want to read a cute coming-of-age tale with a little bit of time travel.

I really loved the fun and quirky premise of this book but have to admit that it fell a little flat for me overall due to slow pacing early on in the story and to characters that didn't feel fully developed. I'm not the target audience of this book though and think that younger readers will find it a very enjoyable read.

Time Travel for Love and Profit is about a girl who has a crappy freshman year and decides to build a timeship app to travel back and get a do over. She travels back but everyone else doesn’t. She ends up reliving freshman year 10 times before things start to change.


So it’s been a couple weeks since I read this one and I’m still not sure how I felt about it. It started out really slow and didn’t until almost halfway through. The writing was decent but the main character was semi annoying and I didn’t feel like she actually learned anything by the end. Which was weird by the way. It didn’t resolve the issues and it was a little bit abrupt. I think I enjoyed it for the most part.

This is very much one of the stranger books I have ever read. The characters are cute, but not as memorable as I expected. The story is not as fulfilling as promised either, with the hope that as you got further into the book, you would start to understand what was going on. Unfortunately, I did not.

DNF at 20%. I really enjoyed the premise - Nephele decided to invent a time travel app to redo her freshman year of high school as a do-over opportunity. Unfortunately the execution isn’t working for me which could be more about my 2020 brain than the book but this isn’t for me right now. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance reading copy.

This book was not what I expected and unfortunately not for me. When I read the synopsis I thought this sounded like a book that was right up my alley but instead I got a book that I found odd and lacking. The potential was there but in my opinion it fell flat ; also something about the story felt off. I don't know if I just felt that way due to the lack of connection I felt to the story itself and the characters ; or if it was the loss of potential that clouded my judgement. With that said the book wasn't necessary bad and I can see why others might enjoy it but for me it was just simply okay.

wow this book was confusing. it was enjoyable in the moment, but I straight up had no idea what was going on. nephele was a great character, and so were her parents. I also loved the setting, especially the bookshop. but if you asked me to explain the plot of this book, I would be completely stumped after saying "a high school freshman invents a time machine to try and get her best friend back." maybe I just didn't get it, but this was a pleasant reading experience that felt incomprehensible. I would recommend it to a younger reader based on writing style and characterization alone, though.

A book about a girl creating a time machine so she can travel back in time and fix things with her best friend and possibly re-invent herself. I thought this premise was great and super interesting but the book itself fell very short. It's a lot of internal monologue and the main characters thoughts and talking to herself a lot of the time. Not much happens and it got to a point I just didn't care. Sad this one didn't work out as I had high expectations.

Thank you to Netgalley and to the publisher for the ARC of this book.

When your first year of high school is a disaster, you long for a do-over. If you're a STEM prodigy like 14-year-old Nephele, you create a time machine that takes you back so you can repeat the year, this time with knowledge and insight guaranteed to make freshman year a success. Unfortunately for Nephele, she ends up caught in a time loop, repeating that freshman year over and over again while all of her peers move on, graduate, and live full adult lives. Sarah Lariviere's TIME TRAVEL FOR LOVE AND PROFIT is a sparkling and creative take on time travel, and her characters are fresh and very real.

Time Travel for Love and Profit is a quirky, unique read. It has an enjoyable storyline that I was able to get through fairly quickly once I had the time to do so. The writing style of the author and the lack of clarity at a few points made it not my favorite, but I would absolutely recommend this short & sweet YA to those who like coming of age stories.

Thank you once again Netgalley for this eARC.

Time Travel for Love and Profit starts out with mathematical prodigy Nephele "Fi" Weather starting freshman year with her best friend Vera giving her the cold shoulder to hang out with the popular kids. Nephele spends the rest of the year going through the general high school hell, but the act of Vera leaving her inspires her: what if she could build a time machine, go back to the first day of freshman year, and become the kind of person Vera wouldn't abandon, the kind everyone would like? Using the power of code, Nephele succeeds...sort of....

The story just didn't do it for me. The humor added a strong voice to the main character, but felt like a lot of unamusing fluff to me. It felt like a caricature of high school complete with beautiful yet cruel popular and mid-level-food-chain kids; outcasts made to come across as gross; and Nephele, a prickly genius. The pacing was off: the first half of the story was dragged along by Nephele's need to perfect the time machine and break out of the time loop and not much else. My interest wasn't piqued until Nephele makes friends.

I liked a few things about the story though. A story about a genius trying to invent a time machine was sure to give me words and concepts I'd never heard of to Google: quasars, quantum foam, fractals, the word 'brobdingnagian', and more. I said earlier that I didn't find the humor funny, but I want to admit again that it did give Nephele a very strong voice and gave me a sense of what her character was about. I appreciated the little twist that I did not see coming that the blurb reveals (the blurb says too much unfortunately) and it was clear that it helped develop Nephele's character. I liked the descriptions of living on the California coast. Also, the ending was somewhat unexpected.

Even though this wasn't my favorite thing I've read recently, I think someone who likes slower-paced, lighthearted, younger YA coming-of-age with a touch of sci-fi and prickly romance-novel-and-math-loving heroines who dream of being kissed and saving the world would appreciate this story.

I recieved a free copy from netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
Unfortunately for me this book was DNF. I really liked the book blurb and I gave this book an honest chance and read a quarter of the book.
I just felt like nothing happened and it was slow and boring.
Not for me.

(actual rating 3.5/5)

Even though this book is really weird in that it doesn't always make a whole lot of sense, I actually enjoyed reading it.

When Nephele Weather's best friend abruptly drops her, leaving her with the worst freshman year ever, Nephele is left with no choice but to take matters into her own hands. Being the science and math genius that she is, she decides to create an app that will allow send her into the past and redo her freshman year. Except, instead of sending her to the past, Nephele loops, keeping her in freshman year while everyone around her moves on, seemingly forgetting about her. Soon enough, it's been ten years, and Nephele's finally starting to figure out where she went wrong, with the help of Jazz, her charming classmate. Only, now that she's figuring out how to go back, she has to ask herself: does she really want to?

The beginning of this book was quite interesting and really set the scene with how things were going to go. I immediately sympathized with Nephele, and her feeling like a fish out of water. I also really liked her character arc, and the dynamic that she had with other characters. While there were some good parts, I felt that this book was better in idea than execution.

For one, there's the writing style. Even though it seemed okay at first, the conversational style of the writing got a bit annoying after some time. I will be the first to admit that even though the math/science-y aspects of this book were explained in not-too-great detail, and in fairly simple language, I didn't understand what was being said and felt like they were more like info-dumps than anything else.

A really big problem that I had with this book is the fact that it didn't really get better/clearer as you read it, at least until the very end. Especially for the middle third of the book, everything felt really choppy and nothing truly made sense. Random things were happening that did little to advance the plot or add anything meaningful to the book. It was actually a bit boring to read through those parts, because I didn't understand what was going on exactly, either.

Other than that, I really enjoyed Nephele's character arc as a whole and the relationships she had with the other characters. I loved reading about how Nephele learned so much about herself and eventually grew into the person that she truly was because she met the right people. The dynamic that she had with her friends was also really sweet. The way that she went from being totally cocooned inside of herself, lashing out and pushing others away before they could hurt her, to opening up to her friends and falling in love with Jazz was adorable. I also found the way that the author was able to include characters from when Nephele was initially a freshman to add to the overall character growth fascinating as well.

Overall, this book was pretty short and sweet, and while there were some issues that I had with it, I loved the 'Groundhog Day' twist that was put on everything. I would definitely recommend it to others who like time travel with a coming-of-age theme in an MG-to-almost-YA book.

A fast read with an engaging narrator, but a disappointing resolution that fails to live up to the strength of the main character.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Well, I had high hopes for a book with such a fun title--but this one just didn't work out well for me. Well intentioned and interesting at times, it was kind of all over the place plot-wise and didn't always make much sense. The writing, while perhaps meant to evoke the teen's personality, was hard for me to get past. Good concept, just didn't work for me.

I really enjoyed this book!! This was such an interesting take on a time travel plot, a lot of which I didn't see coming. I really really loved how it focused on the mathematical parts of time travel. I feel like that made it incredibly unique, and I loved getting to see the reasoning behind the time travel.

I also really liked how Nephele is such a realistic character. She has realistic, 15 year-old reasons to go back in time, and to keep going back. She realized her faults and mistakes and continued to do everything she could to fix them. She never stopped trying to improve upon herself and her scientific creation. However, she also clearly had flaws. With her young age came the inability to forgive or accept new people. All of the years she spent in 9th grade hardened her towards others, which became a problem in her 10th 9th grade.

I really did enjoy this book a lot!!