The Square Root of Summer
Harriet Reuter Hapgood
Gottie is still grieving for her grandfather Grey’s death, while a boy she broke up with and a boy who moved away come back into her life. Her life is increasingly confusing as she drops into the past, and loses hours of her present days as a cost for revisiting last Summer.
The premise of this book is so cool. Gottie is studying physics at school, and is interested in how time-travel might occur. Underlying her enjoyment of school is her fear of moving on to university. In order to motivate her, her physics teacher asks her to come up with a theory of time-travel, and then she will write a bright recommendation letter to get her into any college.
It was fascinating to eventually find out what was going on with everyone. Damn, so people can be so insensitive! I could have killed Jason. You view everything from Gottie’s perspective, so you don’t realise what she looks like on the outside to others. Is she selfish? Is she self-absorbed? Does she mean to be? Since I was already aligned to Gottie from the beginning, I thought she was wonderful.
You can suspend your disbelief in time travel, or you can be as critical as you like. Either way, you’re going to enjoy this romance that isn’t really a romance, again it’s exploring how different people deal with grief and loss. Who is to say that these things didn’t really happen?
4 stars for a teenage romance with a bit of a twist and some science.
