Welcome to my stop on the tour for Paul Cody’s Love is Both Wave and Particle hosted by The Fantastic Flying Book Club! I am really excited for this contemporary that has just been published by Roaring Brook Press. Be sure to read the guest post written by Paul’s wife, Elizabeth Holmes. It is a witty and interesting look into what it’s like living with an author.

Love is Both Wave and Particle
by Paul Cody
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.

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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.

Website | Goodreads

by Elizabeth Holmes (wife of Paul Cody)

I come home from the gym, early in the morning before work, and when I open the front door the first thing I see is my husband, Paul Cody, across the room. He’s sitting at one end of the sofa, hunched over his laptop, typing. He’s a big man, tall, and the laptop looks too small for him. Shoulders up to his ears, elbows pressed in, wrists bent and fingers curled over the keys, he looks like an oversized owl crouched over its prey.

He might look up and say hello, or he might not.

That spot on the couch is HQ, command central, home base, and crow’s nest. The end table beside it is crowded with little things he might possibly want during the long hours he spends there—a cup of coffee, nail clippers, bookmarks, cell phone, the prescription nicotine cartridges he puffs on instead of smoking. He can reach them all without getting up. Two floor lamps, one to light the room and one that bends to shine precisely on the keyboard, or a book.

Oh yes, books. In the small space between the wall and the arm of the sofa are three stacks of them, each about three feet high. Novels, history, memoirs, biographies. Books are stacked on the end table, they fill up its single shelf right to the tabletop. They spill over to the floor beyond the end table. Some sit on the back of the sofa, leaning against the wall next to a box of tissues.

Our sons begin calling the two stacks on the end table the Twin Towers. They point out the Empire State Building (the tallest stack beside the sofa), the Bronx high-rises (the bookcases on the far side of the room).

Reading and writing are Paul’s mission, lifeline, and purpose. His world. He reads for hours and hours every day, fascinated by the words and all they evoke in his mind. I’ve never seen anyone who could read so long without getting restless and moving on to something else.

When he’s writing a book—and he has written many over the years I’ve known him—the process is tightly structured. There may be a brief period of trying out an idea, a couple of false starts, but then he’s off and running. He sets up a schedule and sticks to it. After a writing session he sometimes says it was like pulling teeth—but he always does it. Other times he emerges elated, thrilled and surprised by what he’s done.

Each time he announces how many words he added to the novel that day—seven hundred, a thousand, twelve hundred. He may not know how the book will end, but he knows how long it will be. “Crossed 35,000 words today,” he’ll say. “Halfway there.”

Some days he knows he’s a star, he’s brilliant, his work is up there with the novels of his heroes, James Joyce, Henry James, Don DeLillo. Other days it’s all crap, nobody would want to read this, and it’s stupid.

He has put his heart into writing books that he completed but wasn’t able to sell, and into books that were published with considerable success. But he always puts his heart in it.

He likes to quote James: “We give what we have. We work in the dark.” In other words, when you start a book, you don’t know if you’ll succeed or fail—artistically or in the marketplace. You just do it. And if you’re Paul, you love doing it.

1 copy of LOVE IS BOTH WAVE AND PARTICLE by Paul Cody
US/Canada only (No Giveaway accounts)

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