Review: The Square Root of Summer

Review:

I received a copy from Netgalley.

 

This is one the rare occasions where the book has left me utterly baffled. I didn't have a clue what was going on, hardly through any of it. And the weird thing? I still completely loved it. It’s a UKYA book about a girl who’s obsessed with complex math, space time continuum and theory along those lines.

 

Gottie’s summer is looking pretty dull. The previous summer her beloved grandfather died, she’s not seeing eye to eye with her BFF at the moment, she had a hot and heavy yet secret affair with her brothers band made which ended badly. Her sweet but absend minded father is drifting away more and more. Her older brother Ned is a bit of a dick. Gottie isn’t really coping well. To make things worse the boy next door Thomas, who she was friends with for years and years until he mysteriously moved to Canada is apparently coming back to stay with Gottie and her family for the summer. So she’s a bit all over the place. She desperately misses her grandfather, she has confused feelings for Thomas’s reappearance and is miserable over the relationship that failed with Jason last summer. She wants the feelings back.

 

At the same time, she’s working on some complex mathematics for a school project. A lot to do with space time continuum. When finally steeling herself to look at her grandfather’s things she finds his old diaries and starts reading them. As the summer progresses, weird things start happening with time. She finds herself getting split screens, do overs, visiting time periods that have already happened, and other weird things. That’s about the gist of the plot from what I could gather. There was a lot of complex mathematical equations and lot of drawings and diagrams to go with them throughout the novel.

 

Despite the fact that the math made no sense whatsoever to me, nor the scienecy stuff, I still really enjoyed the book. I even bought a finished paperback so I could get a clearer picture of the math diagrams. Plus, a Back to the Future reference so bonus points there!

 

I loved Gottie as a character. There was something very relatable to her tone, and how she got completely absorbed in the math bit. I also loved her interaction with all the other characters as she tried to deal with feelings lingering for Jason, working things out with her best friend Sophia when she knew things were changing, even her brother Ned, who could be a moron, but in a humours way but not without his deeper moments. The best bit about this book was the relationship between Gottie and Thomas, how they managed to deal with each other and new feelings.

 

All while time was going weird and only Gottie seemed to get it.

 

So weird, timey-whimey awesomeness (sorry, I had to get that quote in there somewhere) a lot of fun and great emotional moments.

 

Thank you to Netgalley and Pan Macmillan for approving my request to view the title.

Original post: sunsetxcocktail.booklikes.com/post/1436886/review-the-square-root-of-summer