YOU GUUUUUUYS. First of all, the hugest thank you to Dutton for allowing me to read an eARC of this book! Secondly, everything you need to know off the bat is that I was approved for this book 7 hours ago, which is exactly how much time it took me to drop basically everything I needed to do today in order to finish it once it hooked me in the first two chapters.

You know those books that are so immersive that you feel like you have a movie playing in your head the entire time? That is 100% the situation here. I had a whole fancast going in my head. Between the magical realism elements, the setting, and the insanely likable cast of characters, this entire story was so charming that I didn't want it to end. With any story that uses a time loop trope, redundancy is typically pretty inevitable, and that can make for an exhausting at best (and boring at worst) read that doesn't always work for me. Without giving anything away, I can confirm with absolute certainty that this was in no way boring OR redundant, and I never felt the telltale urge to skim or skip ahead that can sometimes come from this trope.

The ONE thing that keeps this from being a perfect read, for me, is the inclusion of the influencer best friend's influencing, and more specifically her proclivity for livestreaming, that becomes pretty central at times. I realize that's nitpicky, but for me, heavy use of social media references in a book pulls me out of the story and makes things verge on cheesiness, even amidst a story that impressively veered away from that feeling in other tropes! While I love a melodramatic moment, one of the climaxes of this particular motif was the only part of the story that felt TOO overdramatized for me, even amidst a narrative including time loops and plenty of stretch-of-the-imagination grand gesturing.

That said, in case it wasn't painfully obvious, I really did love this book, and I'm so so excited to see others' reactions once it's out in the world!