This post contains affiliate links, meaning I’ll receive a small commission should you purchase using those links. All opinions expressed are my own. I receive no compensation for reviews.

Review: The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

My Thoughts

A clever and compelling story of love, loss and resilience.

Buy Now: Amazon Kindle | Hardcover | iBooks
Related Posts: 2016 Favorite Singles | Read an excerpt

Synopsis

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.

Gottie H. Oppenheimer is losing time. Literally. When the fabric of the universe around her seaside town begins to fray, she’s hurtled through wormholes to her past:

To last summer, when her grandfather Grey died. To the afternoon she fell in love with Jason, who wouldn’t even hold her hand at the funeral. To the day her best friend Thomas moved away and left her behind with a scar on her hand and a black hole in her memory.

Although Grey is still gone, Jason and Thomas are back, and Gottie’s past, present, and future are about to collide―and someone’s heart is about to be broken.

With time travel, quantum physics, and sweeping romance, The Square Root of Summer is an exponentially enthralling story about love, loss, and trying to figure it all out, from stunning debut YA voice, Harriet Reuter Hapgood.

My Review

As first seen on USA Today HEA

When seventeen year old math savant Gottie H. Oppenheimer starts losing time, she never imagined she’d be traveling through wormholes back and forth between her past to re-live her most heartbreaking moments. Time jerks between past and present as she’s sucked into the true dark matter of her life.

I believe in love on a Big Bang scale.

Over the past several years, she’d lost her mother, her best friend, her heart and just in the past year, her grandfather. Life had lost its luster as grief dulled her own identity. Slowly she’d pulled back from her family and friends, but when her former love and her childhood best friend come barreling back into her life, she’s forced to confront her own heartache.

Unbeknownst to everyone, the previous year she’d given her heart to her brother’s best friend, Jason. Their relationship had been a secret, a surprise, a wonderful thing that splintered to pieces when the summer ended, marked by the death of Grey—her larger-than-life grandfather.

Jason is back for the summer with her brother Ned, opening up the wound which had never really healed. Worse yet, she discovers her childhood best friend, Thomas, was coming back after years of not writing, years of leaving her behind when they were supposed to be forever.

Thomas-and-Gottie were inseparable, trouble times two, an el weirdo club of only us. Until he left.

When her world suddenly begins to “screenwipe,” she finds herself inexplicably reliving whispered promises with Thomas, stolen kisses with Jason. Impossible at it may seem, the physics of spacetime becomes reality as her universe contracts and expands to give her new insight on herself and those she loves. But could re-living the past alter the course of the future? Could she find a way past the hurt she’d been internalizing for so long?