John J. Vinacci

Nacho the peacemaker. Knucklehead the sweet boy. Niles the crackhead. 

I love you and I will always love you. There are some memories that no amount of time could ever erase.  I remember that first day. My partner, now my wife, and I thought her cat, Knucklehead, needed a friend so we decided to go to the Humane Society... You were one of the few that clearly stood out. Your captors cleverly named you Snowshoe – you were mostly white – but you were smarter than your cutesy name suggested. You were one of the few prisoners who seemed interested enough to rouse from their malaise as prospective new parents perused the potential adoptees. I remember you stuck your foot into your water-bowl before drinking – obviously some kind of ingenious feline test for the purity of your sustenance – and I said to my partner something to the effect of, “Look, this one does tricks.” You and I took to each other immediately and you crawled up into my lap though it was obvious you didn’t care for such theatrics. But, you probably figured you should go through the motio...

Let me begin by letting all writers in on a little secret: The ending is everything. Read that again. That said, Ben Oliver’s The Loop left me incredibly angry, giving us one of the worst endings since the movie Sliver and casts the entirety of everything that preceded it into question. This is another one of those “I wanted to like it more than I did” books, this one about a teenage boy locked in a futuristic prison in some dystopian future. Despite immediate Hunger Games/Maze Runner vibes, I was still captivated early on by the simplicity of the plot and ease of prose. There is a lot of suspending of belief to be had, though, as you wonder just how many times someone can cheat death (which could be resolved by the book’s non-ending, if you read it that way). There are a lot of good characters but many of them seem to transform on a dime which doesn’t seem plausible, either. Add in some pseudo-zombies for good measure and you’ve got…something. On a positive note (which will becom...