A Loop in Time
Rowena Wright
Finial Publishing, October 2006, $16.95
ISBN: 1933791071

Sophia Ludwig works for a meager wage at the New York City public library. Being shy, she has few friends and little family outside of her ancient race, the Ringgolds, who have the skills to manipulate time and space. Thus, for the most part she raises her daughter Ericca just above the poverty line, as her beloved spouse Branch Archer, "architect" with a r sum out of a fantasy novel died during the Tunnel Wars.

Though Sophia and her friends have hidden their heritage from Ericca, she is becoming increasingly aware of how different her mom and she are compared to those who attend the same school, as she does like the odious snob Tory Skye. As Erica learns about her inherited talent to work time and space, she enlists the help of her best friends, Albert and Leonardo, who though both are dead "live as bobble heads inside her baby blanket". With their help she begins to plot a course to save her father's life by changing history, especially since she knows his soul lives, though that means entering the time tunnels that connect alternate realities.

A LOOP IN TIME, book one of the Polis series, is not an easy novel to read because of the complexities of the plot, especially with the time-space continuum for example, that enables great thinkers like Albert and Leonardo to "live" though dead. Ericca is a delightful protagonist, as she struggles to understand a universe where everything is possible, as the cause and effect model is not the only perceivable relationship. Though the key support players are not fully developed, making them less understandable than readers will want, fans who desire something different in their science fiction will want to visit Wright's realm, where receiving advice from bobble heads is as normal as the plate breaking before you drop it.