Review - "The Square Root of Summer"

The Square Root of Summer
by Harriet Reuter Hapgood
rating:☆☆☆☆
published: 6th May 2016
spoilers? yes

Goodreads

This is what it means to love someone. This is what it means to grieve someone. It's a little bit like a black hole. It's a little bit like infinity.

Galley provided by publisher.

The Square Root of Summer has been on my to-read list since last November, and was one of my anticipated reads for this year. The synopsis intrigued me, especially the promise of time travel mixed with a YA contemporary, and the book itself did not disappoint.

The book follows the story of Gottie Oppenheimer, a year on from the death of her grandfather. She's just getting over his death, and the subsequent break-up between her and her secret boyfriend, who just so happens to be one of her brother's best friends, when her dad tells her that their ex-neighbour, and her best friend until 5 years before when he moved to Canada, is coming to stay with them. Gottie hasn't talked to Thomas since he left, even though they were best friends and inseparable, even though they made a blood pact the day before he moved away.

Thomas coming back seemingly coincides with the fraying of the spacetime fabric resulting in the creation of wormholes that Gottie keeps slipping through into her past, and into memories she doesn't want to relive. While Gottie tries to figure out what is going on, and how these wormholes are being created, she has to navigate through all the relationships in her life, from dealing with Thomas' return and Jason ignoring what they had together, and her other best friend, Sof's desire to start hanging out again.

One of the major things I loved about this book, was the subversion of the "girls are good at art and boys at science" trope. Gottie was amazing at physics and maths, but terrible at art, while her brother Ned, was the artist. I will happily read any book that includes this.

Another great thing was that the physics that was used to describe how the wormholes formed was all correct (and complete with diagrams to explain it) and not simplistic or explained vaguely (as in some books I might mention). It was all solid physics (if a bit tenuous because there's no way of proving it and it's all theoretical but that's just an issue I have with theoretical physics in general).

This book reminded me a lot of I'll Give You The Sun which was one of the best books I read last year, and high up on my all-time favourites list. I would definitely recommend this book to everyone who liked that. Actually, I think I would recommend this book to anyone because it was so good I read it in one morning and I already want a reread.