Book ReviewGuest AuthorGuest PostHarriet Reuter HapgoodPanMacMillan PublishingReviewThe Square Root of SummerYoung Adult Books
The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood
By Christine Diampovisa
By
trying to work out what’s going on, you’re interfering with destiny … A
particle can be in two places at once. A particle can interfere with its own
past. It can have multiple futures, and multiple pasts
Gottie’s world starts to come
undone as she is transported through wormholes to her past:
To last summer, when her
grandfather, Grey, suddenly dies.
To the afternoon she fell in love
with Jason, who wouldn’t even hold her hand at Grey’s funeral.
To the day her childhood friend,
Thomas, moved away, leaving her with a scar on her hand and a gap in her
memory.
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REVIEW – Based on the pretty cover
and the intriguing title, I was excited to read The Square Root of Summer. We’re introduced to Gottie, a teenage girl
who is obsessed with mathematics, space and physics. For someone who scrapped
through math and physics in high school, I was really confused when it came to
the explanation of principles or diagrams relating to time travel and infinity.
Really confused and slightly intrigued, I read on …
Gottie has had to deal with the
death of her mother, who died after giving birth to her, the death of her
grandfather (who was more like a father), her boyfriend Jason and her best
friend Thomas. Her life of reclusiveness makes it easier for her to blend in
the background (as easy as a five-foot-nine leaf), but makes it easy for her
presence to go unnoticed.
As the summer rolls around, Jason
returns from college bringing back old feelings,
“My feet grow roots while I wait
for him to stand up. To talk to me. To mend me.”
Summer also brings her
best friend Thomas, who she hasn’t spoken to in the last five years. When
Thomas left, a part of Gottie disappeared.
The book almost
centres on Grey, even though he is no longer there, showing us just how much he
meant to her. While dealing with the grief of Grey’s death, Gottie erstwhile
best friend become estranged,
“The silence that
rides between us all the way home is so heavy, it deserves its own bus ticket.”
We are going through
the motions when suddenly Gottie starts leaping through time and space. Going through the wormhole so unexpectedly
leaves you feeling as dazed as Gottie. Wormhole surfing might seem unreal, but
it takes you away from the real world. Leaving minutes, hours, maybe days
unaccounted for.
The book is
beautifully written with characters, whose lives are easily intertwined. Being
of German descent (Gottie’s father), a few German words are used which add to
the richness of the book. The pace of
the book felt very natural, nothing seemed rushed or slowed down even though we
were travelling through space and time. Remarkable!
Going through the
wormholes could have been a way for Gottie to relive the summer before
everything changed, before Grey died and she got her heartbroken, to imagine
what her life would be like if Thomas stayed and she never got involved with
Thomas, to imagine a life where she never existed and killed her mother, to
imagine a life where she still had friends and a sense of what life should
be … Sadly, these questions were not
answered in a direct sense, but when you’re dealing with wormholes, time
travelling and a summer where your past, present and future collide, what were
you expecting?
“The universe is
complicated”, is the perfect way to sum up this book: beautifully-written with
well-developed characters, makes for an interesting read but leaves you so many
questions.
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