posted on 30 May 2016

The Square Root of Summer by Harriet Reuter Hapgood

This is an unusual YA novel because the seventeen year old heroine Margot ( aka Gottie) is very good at mathematics and physics, a passion that is central to the plot. For this reason alone I doubt that I would have bought this if I hadn't heard the author being interviewed about it at the recent FCBG conference. Harriet Reuter Hapgood is a free-lance journalist and this is her first novel. She explained that she intended it to be a book about quantum physics and grief, with romance as an additional element and I think that is what she has achieved. It is refreshing to find such a clever female character outside a Harry Potter book, but I was and am still very intimidated by these subjects and so approached it with caution.

The overriding theme is set somewhere on the Norfolk coast and is about time travel and moving in and out of time through wormholes that get closer and closer to a key event which has haunted Gottie for over a year. This is a bit too close to Doctor Who territory for me which also makes me feel pretty stupid as I cannot follow those plots at all. However, the author does try hard to clarify it all throughout the story using diagrams and some clever metaphors for her less scientific friend, Thomas and at the very end it provides a Poirot- like-in-the-library detailed exposition. As part of this I was immensely relieved when I read 'The rules of space time don't apply. When you broke my heart, the world split into a thousand timelines' because that meant I sort of understood what had been going on!

But thankfully it wasn't all about science. The reason behind Gottie's very strange experiences is her unresolved grief at the unexpected death the year before of her grandfather who was a eccentric old hippy known as 'Grey.' I rather warmed to this character who was the head of her unconventional family, the biological father of her mother who died in childbirth and someone whose blend of practicality, creativity and wisdom made him quasi father to everyone else who remained in the sorrowing family. He provided the stability to his bereaved son in law and his two grandchildren, Ned and Gottie. I guess that there must be quite a lot of grandparents like him out there who need to be better represented in fiction. His death has left Gottie reeling with grief and resentment that she struggles to articulate: ‘All my words were cremated with him’

During that sad summer the year before the story is set, she also falls in love for the first time with Jason, who then casts her aside, her best friend emigrates to Canada and her elder brother leaves home for university. So everything that was stable and predictable is turned upside down and a year on, she needs to reflect on what has happened and prepare for the next phase of her life. The author deliberately put all the action in the past which gives Gottie the chance to stop and consider in the present time. Moving backwards in time of course gives her the chance to puzzle out why certain things happened as well as tempt her to change the past. I think this works very well. I liked the way that her father is also depicted as being in mourning for his wife. He is German and often uses his preferred language and heavily accented English which she decides might be because he often deliberately sounds extra foreign because he is locked into a particular happy earlier time in his life when there was still the possibility of returning home to Germany. He is also a bookseller who manages the ramshackle Book Barn, an element which has obvious attractions for me.

The author also said that she wanted the novel to have a distinct summer atmosphere, and again she is successful. On her website she defines summer as:

Hot skin and cool sea water. Mr Whippy 99s and bare feet on sun-browned grass. Cider and freckles and my cat, flipping over and over in a patch of sun by the window. Jasmine and honeysuckle in the garden, falling in love, reading books in trees and trailing home after dark in days that last twice as long as forever. Friends.

The story opens with a vivid scene in the garden under what turns out to be a very important tree. Her distinctive writing paints a heady atmosphere of stillness, buzzing and dry lazy heat which pervades the strange summer as the plot unfolds, much of which takes place outside. It was interesting to hear that she remembered her parents having a large collection of what might now be termed YA literature, including ‘ I Capture the Castle’ and ‘ The Greengage Summer’ which she loved and it is clear to see the influence of books like these.

I liked this novel because it wasn’t what I expected and had some unusual but likeable characters. The other day I was talking with a friend about how YA fiction sometimes focuses too much on teenagers and doesn’t develop other characters very well. Although this is written from the perspective of a seventeen year old, we do learn a lot about her father and grandfather along the way. She describes it as a memorial to her grandmother that turned out to be a love letter to her own family, ‘a bunch of mathematical German bohemian book–loving weirdos’. I look forward to lots more in the future.

Karen Argent

30th May 2016