Bog Tour: Love is Both Wave and Particle
By: Paul Cody
LOVE IS BOTH WAVE AND PARTICLE
“My First Book for Teens”
Publisher:
Roaring Brook Press
Release
Date: August 1, 2017
Genre:
Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Synopsis:
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.
Amazon- https://www.amazon.ca/Love-Both-Wave-Particle-Paul/dp/1626726884
BookDepository-https://www.bookdepository.com/Love-Is-Both-Wave-and-Particle-Paul-Cody/9781626726888
I didn’t intend
to write Love Is Both Wave and Particle
for teenagers. I had always written dark literary fiction for adults, usually
about people who were mentally ill, or somehow living at the margins of
society—in prisons, or mental hospitals, or on the streets.
But I taught at
colleges and universities for more than fifteen years, and nearly all my
students were anywhere from seventeen to twenty-one years old. One course I
taught often was focused on personal essay and writing from experience.
The very nature
of that course encouraged students to write about their lives, their hopes,
fears, the things that had upset them or gave them joy. The students often
wrote about cutting, eating disorders, sexual assault, depression, alcohol and
drug problems, and serious problems with their parents.
I got to know the
students unusually well, because they were writing from the heart. It made me
realize how even “normal-seeming” students were often carrying heavy emotional
burdens, and how often, writing about the burdens would somehow ease the pain.
I also have two
sons who had recently passed through their mid to late teens. So, I felt I knew
kids of that age.
Kids that age
are in flux. Not quite adults, not only teenagers. They have driver’s licenses,
are only a year away from voting or joining the military. Many drink alcohol,
at least a little, some smoke weed.
I wanted to
write a novel about two seventeen-year-olds, each with some history of mental
illness or disability, and throw them together, in a fairly small setting, to
see what would happen.
Would they hate each
other?
Understand each
other?
Might they fall
in love?
Might they even
change each other in big or small ways?
Part of being a
teenager, I’d always thought, was growing up and away from the influence of
parents and home, and finding different influences in the world, from friends,
teachers, musicians, books, and the internet. Many things go into the process
of growing up.
As I got deeper
in the writing of Love Is Both Wave and
Particle, the characters deepened and changed for me. Often, a character
who I thought was a certain kind of person, who was cynical and heartless,
turned out to have lots of heart and a real sense of decency. It had just been
buried beneath a façade of cynical cool.
My main
characters, Sam and Levon, were often contradicting my expectations for them. I
wanted them to go left, and they wanted to go right. And in pretty much every
case, I tried to watch and listen carefully, and I nearly always followed their
leads.
Characters
become alive to me as I’m writing, and I develop great respect and affection
for them during the creation of a novel.
When I finished
the novel, and sent it to the woman who’s now my agent, she read it and said, “This
is a terrific young adult novel.”
I was absolutely
surprised, but very curious about the genre. I thought of Huck Finn and The Catcher in
the Rye, and that in many ways those are young adult novels, and those are
also novels I had loved for decades.
And then when I
thought of the thousands of students I had taught, and when I looked at my two
sons and their many friends, it made perfect sense that I had written a novel about
young adults for young adults.
Just as my
characters had surprised me, I had surprised myself.
Paul Cody earned an MFA at Cornell
University, and has published several novels and a memoir for adults. He lives
in Ithaca, New York, with his wife, the poet Elizabeth Holmes, and their two
sons. Love Is Both Wave and Particle is his first novel for teenagers.
Links:
August 1st
Pink Polka Dot Books- Welcome Post
August 2nd
Little Library Muse- Promo
August 3rd
Serial Bibliophile- Review & Bookstagram
YA Book Divas- Review
August 4th
Mind of a Book Dragon- Guest Post
The Candid Cover- Guest Post
August 5th
Never Too Many to Read- Guest Post
A Dream Within a Dream- Promo
August 6th
JusticeReads- Guest Post
Here's to Happy Endings- Review
August 7th
When Curiosity Killed the Cat- Review
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