Having already broken out of the Loop, it shouldn’t be a shock when Luka, soon after the book starts, escapes the Block with the help of his allies and resumes the revolution against the Alts and Happy.

Aside from keeping him right in the head, it also creates a space in which Happy tries to manipulate Luka into leaking intel as to where his insurgent companions are hiding after the Battle of Midway Park, but to no avail. This is why he’s allowed to take six-hour breaks in the Sane Zone, a Matrix-like simulation built from Luka’s memories. However, the system can’t utilize him like a battery if he loses his mind from being put through such a procedure for too long. The Block is actually more excruciating than the Loop, subjecting Luka to a daily twelve-hour energy harvest that draws from his fear and fuels Happy. and seized control of the World Government in its quest to wipe humanity off the face of the earth. This summer, we’re reunited with Luka in the sequel, The Block, which is named after yet another torturous prison that drains energy from its captives and is overseen by Happy, which began as a simple operating system, then evolved into a HAL-9000-like A.I. Perfect for fans of The Hunger Games, The Matrix, and The Maze Runner, The Loop turned out to be one of my top books of 2020.

The thrills never let up as Luka and his fellow inmates committed a jailbreak and struggled to survive the crumbling world that exists outside. But he couldn’t really enjoy himself while behind bars in the Loop, a death-row prison that the World Government used to run experiments on and harvest energy from the prisoners whom it deemed as lower-class Regulars, all for the benefit of the cybernetically-enhanced and privileged Altereds, or Alts for short. What’s new, folks? Last year I read The Loop, a YA dystopian novel by debut author Ben Oliver that kicked off in the future on first-person narrator Luka Kane’s sixteenth birthday.

The block the loop 2 ben oliver