A Quantum Love Story is a quantum physics meeting Fifty First Dates sort of romance; though it doesn’t meet the Romance Writers of America definition of a romance, it is a slow-burn romance that fizzles out before true completion. When a San Francisco particle accelerator blows up, Carter Cho and everyone in it is thrown into a four-day time loop that seems to repeat endlessly, though Carter was apparently the only one zapped by a mysterious green current.
Carter’s memory, bank account, and even his cholesterol levels reset every Monday morning. Though he failed his quantum physics major in college, he is enough of a scientist that, once he realizes he is looping, he tries to break out of it and does experiments to determine how. He writes notes to himself in note books so offset the memory loss. Mariana Pineda is a neuroscientist working with the ReLive project, a firm developing perfect memory recall. She visits the Hawke accelerator project one day and also becomes trapped in the same time loop. Carter manages to get her to work with him to solve the problem. They are just beginning to feel something for each other when Carter starts losing his memory.
The first part of the book deals with Carter trying to solve the loop problem and getting Marina to help him. In the second part of the book, Mariana takes the lead and makes a huge sacrifice to save the world from the loop.
Chen avoids much of the repetitiveness inherent in a time loop story by showing the progression of Carter and Mariana’s efforts to defeat the loop. The story never bogs down in too much hard science, yet I was able to suspend disbelief.
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A Quantum Love Story (MIRA; Original edition, January 30, 2024) is available through:
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You can read my review of Chen’s A Beginning at the End here.
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