The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

TL;DR a summer of regret and wormholes

TBR #1665, added Jun 10th 2016

finished 6/29/16

The Fierce Reads twitter has promoted The Square Root of Summer a lot, which was the majority of the reason I picked it up. (I do have to admit that their promotion didn't win me over on it, though. I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did. Twitter isn't the best medium because of the character limit.)

I was initially drawn in because of Gottie's voice. I really connected with her narration, and that alone usually kept me reading when my attention tried to wander off and do other things. I did do a lot of pick-up-put-downs, though. It's pretty easy to jump back into, but my copy from the library was bigger than I'm used to and I had to search longer to figure out where I left off on the page. (That's my own fault, though.)

I also connected a lot to how Gottie felt over the course of the book, with how her life was changing even without the wormholes. The book felt especially melancholic to me because of that.

Reuter Hapgood does a really good job with explaining the science of what Gottie is experiencing. I've landed on the Wikipedia pages for a lot of the topics, both out of research and Wiki Adventures, and she explained them a lot more concisely than Wikipedia had. It's not hard sci-fi, so you should be able to easily understand what's going on even if you suck with science like I do.

Also, the illustrations in the book were both cute and very helpful. I wish more YA books had little illustrations in them tbh.

The timeline was a little hard for me to wrap my head around, especially once Gottie starts to understand what the wormholes are doing, but that's probably a problem on my end. I wasn't really expecting a closed-loop paradox based on how the book was progressing. I'm definitely up to re-reading the book to see if I can follow it better a second time around, and I like the idea of buying a copy to keep it around. I can see myself re-reading this more than once.

I'm not usually that good with matching songs to books, "Let's See How Far We've Come" By Matchbox 20 seems to fit really well! (It came up on shuffle while I was writing this post lol, thank u Amazon Prime Music)

TL;DR it's melancholic but also pretty light (which I wasn't expecting) and I liked the time travel of it. I definitely liked Gottie as the main character and I'd love to own a copy of the book in the future.