This achingly beautiful novel considers how to measure love when it has the power to both save and destroy.
Levon Grady and Samantha Vash are both students at an alternative high school for high-achieving but troubled teens. They have been chosen for a year-long project where they write their life stories and collect interviews from people who know them. The only rule is 100% confidentiality—they will share their work only with each other. What happens will transform their lives.
Told from the perspectives of Levon, Sam, and all the people who know them best, this is a love story infused with science and the exploration of identity. Love Is Both Wave and Particle looks at how love behaves in different situations, and how it can shed light on even the darkest heart.
This is one of those books for which you have to roll your eyes a few times and remember that it's YA lit, so it's not necessarily supposed to be realistic sometimes, but if you can get past this, it's a stunner and a great exploration of relationships.
The biggest selling point of this one for me was the various interspersed chapters from other perspectives, and the way it felt like it really could be the project of high school seniors. I loved that. I loved the way other people put their opinions on our two main characters in and how these offered intriguing insights.
This story does throw you slightly in the deep end, starting off with an ambulance incident which already had my mind whirling with various character names, but I think that this style pays off, and that it's worth getting through the first few chapters and becoming oriented with the direction that it's taking.
I think that it could have benefitted by breaking away from the norms a bit more and focusing on the development of other relationships, but perhaps I ask too much.
Overall though, if you tend to enjoy multiple narrators or the traditional boy/girl alternating voice, this is a solid story.
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
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