Love and Gravity
Eminent 17th-century scientist Sir Isaac Newton never married, and he reportedly wasn’t romantically involved with anyone. What if that wasn’t true? Sotto, author of Before Ever After, delivers another time-bending romantic adventure with her latest, which imagines a love story between Newton and a modern woman, a gifted cellist, who manages to bridge the 300-plus years through music. The premise is fanciful, but Sotto is reliably good at traveling along life’s offbeat paths.
Andrea Louviere first sees Newton when she’s seven, after a crack in her bedroom wall opens wide enough for her to glimpse a boy about her age. The only person she dares tell is her school friend, Nate, who doesn’t believe her. As Andrea grows up, and her relationship with Nate turns romantic, she and Isaac develop a mysterious bond. When Andrea is seventeen, she begins receiving Isaac’s letters via an elderly messenger who somehow has contact with them both. She determines to unlock the mystery of the shared future Isaac speaks of, but this seems impossible, since the objects they exchange through the time-portal all turn to dust.
Most of the novel is set in the present, with lengthy sections showing Newton’s childhood in Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire and his later years at grammar school and at Cambridge. The novel isn’t as substantive historically as it could be, and the secondary characters are mostly vague shadows. Someone like Nate deserves better than the second place to which he’s relegated, too. The time-travel mechanism is clever, though, one that takes into account both parties’ talents, and the story grows significantly poignant in the last third or so. This isn’t The Time Traveler’s Wife, which it clearly emulates, but it’s an entertaining diversion for romance fans open to something different.
