A review by ellaroshea
See You in the Cosmos by Jack Cheng

4.0

A sweet book, which I am rereading from my tween years. This book is incredibly nostalgic, featuring characteristically lonely, desolate places in the western USA that have a particular kind of earthy magic to them (even places like Las Vegas, where a city that only really was made to function as an extravagant stopover exists in the middle of endless eerie desert). Alex's voice is charming, and so honest and childlike and sometimes trying to comprehend the big things in life with unrelenting excitement and persistence not yet worn out of him by time and society. He's funny, insightful, vulnerable, clever and loving, and the best future astrophysicist I could imagine. In one of my favourite passages, he talks about his favourite 4D shape, the tesseract, and how we can only see the tesseract's 3D shadow to perceive it; very astutely, he then goes on to exclaim that the big feelings in life, love, fear and others, are tesseracts, or perhaps even the same tesseract, but our words are only ever 3D or 2D- 'words are shadows too'. He puts into words the fundamental failing of words in such a beautifully Alex way, and I think that's what's so special about this book; it's someone with their own voice phrasing the unphrasable through it.