A Higher Geometry

It's 1959, the year Anna Conway turns 16. She misses with fierce longing her grandmother Meema, a painter who helped raise her. Anna's parents are loving but uncomprehending of Anna's intensity at school, where she finds mathematics not only pleasurable but beautiful. She also takes pleasure in Mike, who cares for her, takes her to the movies and gives her his ID bracelet. Readers will wait tensely with Anna while she maneuvers to get her parents to let her enter a statewide math contest, and then go to Chicago to participate in a national one. Contemporary teens will likely be fascinated not only by how strict Anna's parents are in terms of monitoring her activities and actions, but with how much she, as a girl with deep mathematical talent, has to struggle just to use it and to keep learning. Anna's strength, coming from her Meema's belief in her, is vivid and natural in this first-person narrative. The mathematics is elegantly and clearly described, and her relationship with Mike is lovely. He supports and admires her, they have sex (mostly offstage) and it neither ruins her life nor directs it. A terrific teen read. (Fiction. YA)