This book was sweet and wonderful and the perfect thing to take my mind off the fact that we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic and online school starts next week and everything feels uncertain.
I loved the perspective this was written from – third person omniscent, which is pretty uncommon. The book was punctuated with these poetic little detours to science and other bystander’s perspectives. The prologue is below.
“Carl Sagan said that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. When he says “from scratch,” he means from nothing. He means from a time before the world even existed. If you want to make an apple pie from nothing at all, you have to start with the Big Bang and expanding universes, neutrons, ions, atoms, black holes, suns, moons, ocean tides, the Milky Way, Earth, evolution, dinosaurs, extinction-level events, platypuses, Homo erectus, Chro-Magnon man, etc. You have to start at the beginning. You must invent fire. You need water and fertile soil and seeds. You need cows and people to milk them and and more people to churn that milk into butter. You need wheat and sugar cane and apple trees. You need chemistry and biology. For a really good apple pie, you need the arts. For an apple pie that can last for generations, you need the printing press and the Industrial Revolution and maybe even a poem.
“To make a thing as simple as an apple pie, you have to create the whole wide world.”
The story follows Natasha, a teenage girl, about to be deported to Jamaica, where she hasn’t been since she moved away when she was eight.
“Besides the fact that I’m being deported today, I am really not a girl to fall in love with. For one thing, I don’t like temporary, nonprovable things, and romantic love is both temporary and nonprovable.
“The other, secret thing that I don’t say to anyone is this: i’m not sure I’m capable of love. Even temporarily. When I was with Rob, I never felt the way the songs say you’re supposed to feel. I didn’t feel swept away or consumed. I didn’t need him like I needed air. I really liked him. I liked looking at him. I liked kissing him, but I always knew I could live without him.”
Natasha is very logical, centered on finding a solution to her current situation, and deeply upset by her father, and his actions that have led to their impending deportation.
“One possible solution to the grandfather paradox is the theory of multiverses originally set forth by Hugh Everett. According to multiverse theory, every version of our past and future histories exists, just in an alternate universe.
“For every event at the quantum level, the current universe splits into multiple universes. This means that for every choice you make, an infinite number of universes exist in which you made a different choice.”
Daniel is a teenage boy who is supposed to be doing an alumni interview for Yale, second best school, so that he can go and study pre-med and become a doctor. He doesn’t want to be a doctor, he wants to be a poet.
“I am a scholar compiling the Book of Natasha. Here’s what I know so far: She’s a science geek. She’s probably smarter than me. Her fingers are slightly longer than mine and feel good in my hands. She likes her music angsty. She’s worried about something having to do with her mysterious appointment.”
Daniel’s perspective jaunts into headlines about his life, as though he is the sole editor and writer of the newspaper of record on himself and those around him.
“Area Boy Attempts to Use Science to Get the Girl
“I wasn’t kidding about the falling-in-love scientifically thing. There was even an article in the New York Times about it.
“A researcher put two people in a lab and had them ask each other a bunch of intimate questions. Also, they had to stare into each other’s eyes for four minutes without talking. I’m pretty sure I’m not getting her to do the staring thing with me right now . To be honest, I didn’t really believe the article when I read it. You can’t just make people fall in love, right? Love is way more complicated than that. It’s not just a matter of choosing a couple of people and making them ask each other some questions, and then love blossoms. The moon and the stars are involved. I’m certain of it.”